"The horse will be here 5,000 years from now.
That’s as eternal as you can get.”
By ANDREW C. REVKIN Copyright © 1999 by the New York Times
BEACON, NY, June 25, 1999 - Five hundred years ago, Leonardo da Vinci’s long-held plan to cast a 24-foot-tall bronze horse for his patron, Duke Ludovico Sforza of Milan, crumbled when invading French troops used the full-size clay model for crossbow practice.
Leonardo never completed the piece. Some biographical accounts have him crying on his death bed over the unfulfilled vision – to create the largest equestrian sculpture in the world.
Today, Leonardo’s dream, that he first articulated in a postage-stamp-size sketch, was revealed in three jaw-dropping dimensions, in the form of a proudly prancing 15-ton bronze stallion, exactly to his proportions. It was cast and assembled at a foundry here, 60 miles north of New York City.
The transformation of the horse from dusty red sketches to burnished bronze was the result of another man’s dreams. After reading Leonardo’s unfinished project in an issue of National Geographic in 1978, Charles C. Dent, a United Airlines pilot, art collector and amateur sculptor from Allentown, PA, began crafting a preliminary clay model and raising money to cast the statue as a gift for Milan.
Mr. Dent died in 1994, but in his will endowed a foundation to see the project to its end. Today, $6 million and five years later, the result towered over a crowd of several hundred visitors from as near as around the block and as far away and Milan’s City Hall.
“This is an homage to the Renaissance,” said Mr. Dent’s nephew, Peter C. Dent, who is a trustee of Leonardo da Vinci’s Horse, Inc., the private group created to build the statue. “He loved Leonardo and he loved that era.”
The public showing here is the last step before the sculpture’s seven pieces are dismantled next week and flown in an Alitalia cargo jet to Milan, where it will be erected on a pedestal in a new cultural park at the edge of the Hippodrome. The pieces will be welded together and unveiled on September 10, the 500th anniversary of the day the French army occupied the ducal palace and disfigured Leonardo’s prototype.
While children, retirees and passing commuters snapped photographs of the horse outside, inside the cavernous main building at the Tallix Foundry, which cast the sculpture, workers busily smoothed the weld marks on pieces of the only other full-size casting. The second horse is scheduled to be shipped this fall to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where it will be displayed in a new sculpture park.
Charles C. Dent, an airline pilot who died in 1994, endowed the project
to bring Leonardo da Vinci's vision to fruition.
The foundry air held a mix of the dank smell of clay and the tang from the wine-red wax that burns away when the molten bronze is poured, the final step of making the casting. Dozens of other works in every conceivable style and at various stages of completion crowded the five-story-tall room. A life-size clay model of a nurse destined for the site of a former nursing school in Hartford, CT, stood near a 17-foot-tall clay model of Antinous, a pleasure-loving figure in the court of Hadrian. Antinous will be cast in artificial marble and sent to the Peppermill Hotel Casino in Reno, Nevada, said its creator, Gail Demi Wilday, as she scraped a bit of clay from the giant’s toe.
But everything in the foundry building was dwarfed by the clay model that was the basis for the snorting bronze horse on the lawn outside.
Ms. Wilday pausing in her work, said the power of the horse lay in its history. “It shows how the dream world can become a reality, she said. “When I stand under the head and look up, I just want to cry, it’s so overwhelmingly beautiful.”
The open house at the foundry is scheduled to last all weekend, with a Renaissance fair being staged by local merchants, who are promoting this slowly reviving city as a haven for the arts. Earlier this year, the Dia Center for the Arts announced plans to convert an old printing factory at the other end of town into a gallery than that will be larger than the Museum of Art.
In the throng surrounding Leonardo’s horse, which was ringed by gold rope, reactions ranged from abstruse analysis by art aficionados to spontaneous outbursts from children.
Nina Akamu, the sculptor who built the eight-foot clay model that was enlarged to make the giant final bronze, described the two years of research that went into the final version. The main resource was a trove of Leonardo’s drawings that surfaced in Madrid in 1965, but only a few of those were directly related to his plans for the Milan horse, she said. One of the key drawings was one inch across, and to get from that to a full-size sculpture required a lot of artistic license, ms. Akamu said.
“This is not a recreation of a Leonardo da Vinci drawing,” she said. “It’s a tribute, an homage, a synthesis.”
Giangelaleazzo Visconti di Modrone, a representative from the City Council of Milan, shaded his eyes and stared up at the horse, which is captured in mid trot, with one hind leg and one foreleg suspended in the air, nostrils flared, eyes glaring.
He said he recently viewed some of Leonardo’s red-pencil drawings at a Venice exhibition. “It is very well made," he said of the sculpture. “It has the same strength, the same lines.”
Nearby stood a patron of the project, Frederik Meijer, 79, who owns a chain of warehouse-style supermarket and retail stores and created the public sculpture gardens in Grand Rapids that will house the $2.4 million copy.
He said the value of monumental works of art lay in their permanence. “I’ve got 121 stores and 80,000 employees, but our gardens and this sculpture will outlast all of that. The horse will be here 5,000 years from now. That’s as eternal as you can get.”
Although the foundry will only cast two 24-foot horses, they will make smaller bronze versions – ranging from 8 feet high ones costing $380,000 to 5 inch ones for $750 – to raise money for Leonardo da Vinci’s Horse, Inc., which will support Renaissance studies and similar art projects.
Mona Scalzo, who grew up around the corner from the foundry and now lives a few miles away in Fishkill, said the sculpture was going to help elevate the reputation of Beacon. “Beacon is similar to New Jersey,” she said. “It doesn’t get any respect. But now everyone around the world will know us.”
Three young girls from Poughkeepsie gawked at the horse while their father took pictures. Jacqueline Slater, 11, said of Leonardo: “He’s the one who painted ‘The Last Supper.’”
Her little sister, Meghan, 7, quickly corrected her: “No, that was Leonardo di Caprio.”
Milan, Sept. 10 – Five Hundred years to the day that French soldiers destroyed a work in progress by Leonardo da Vinci of what would have been the largest equestrian statue in existence, a 24-foot-high, 15-ton silicon bronze sculpture of the stallion was unveiled today in a garden that forms part of the city’s racing track.
American art lovers had mostly donated the money for the work, and the installation ceremony today was attended by some 700 Americans who had come from throughout the United States (many visiting Italy for the first time) to be present at the ceremony.
Most were donors and sponsors who, a few dollars at a time, had managed to raise the $6.5 million needed to cast the statue in the Tallix Foundry in Beacon, NY, and bring it here.
As blue and white balloons floated away to lift a billowy white cloth, uncovering the enormous bronze piece, many in the crowd dabbed at their eyes and snapped dozens upon dozens of photographs.
The Americans had come because of the vision of one man, Charles C. Dent, a retired airline pilot, amateur sculpture and art collector from Allentown, PA, who had read about Leonardo’s project in a 1977 National Geographic article based on Leonardo’s ideas and offer it as a gift to Milan. After the death of Mr. Dent in 1994, Leonardo da Vinci’s Horse Inc., a nonprofit organization he had created in 1982, took over the project.
“Over the years this project was probably carried on faith more than anything else,” said Sam Saxton, one of the original supporters, who came to Milan with a group from Allentown. “Just being here is an overwhelming event, the fact that it really is happening.”
Charles Cobb, a visitor from Georgia, was thrilled to “see history in the making and be part of it,” he said, adding that “unfortunately, a lot of dreams are never realized, so it is important to be present when dreams do come true.”
In explaining the gesture of the gift, Roger Enloe, president of he Leonardo da Vinci’s Horse organization, told the few Italians present at the ceremony: “We respect your history; we have admiration for your artists; we are devoted to the work you did in the Renaissance, which left us with a great legacy.”
And people were lured by Leonardo. Michael J. Gelb, author of the book “How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci” (Delacorte), which he dedicated to Mr. Dent, believes that the myth of Leonardo continues to attract people because the Renaissance master “is a symbol for human potential” and that “he represents our aspirations to create.”
Mr. Gelb, in Milan to promote the Italian translation of his book, saw the horse as a sort of “Statue of Liberty for creativity.”
Though both Leonardo and Mr. Dent died before they could see their projects to completion, their presence was very much felt throughout the ceremony.
Nina Akamu, the American sculptor who was commissioned to recreate the horse after Mr. Dent’s death, paid homage to him and to Leonardo by inscribing their names in the pupils f the horse’s eyes.
The completed statue is apparently not quite what Leonardo had envisioned. For instance, it is missing its rider, the Milanese duke Francesco Sforza, to whom it was dedicated. There are no known models of sketches of the final work, and scholars today are still unsure what the completed monument would have looked like and just what was destroyed in September 1499 by the French, who used it for crossbow practice.
“We don’t know for sure whether the model had the rider or not, but the final version would certainly have included Francesco Sforza,” said Petro Marani, a Milanese cultural official and a Leonardo specialist, speaking of the destroyed work. “I understand that for practical purposes they have limited the sculpture to the horse, but this thing gives a pale idea of what the monument would have looked like.”
The Leonardo da Vinci’s Horse organization says it had never meant to recreate Leonardo’s horse or his monument but rather give an interpretation of it.
Ms. Akamu based her own sculpture on a detailed study of Leonardo’s drawings and the works of his predecessors. She said the statue was not a copy of Leonardo’s but a tribute to him.
The few Italians at the unveiling appeared to be enthusiastic about the statue, but national newspapers virtually ignored the event.
Then there were those who felt uneasy about what some perceived as the “Americanization of the Renaissance.”
It’s all a little curious, the fact that this comes from the States,” said a press officer for the Ministry of Culture, “but Italy is different from the United States – we’ll always have the originals.”
