is standing here. On his left is
Ahura Mazda, on his right is
Anahita, and below is, Khosrau dressed as a mounted Persian knight riding on his favourite horse,
Shabdiz, in the city of,
Kermanshah,
Iran Ancient Greece Equestrian statuary in the West dates back at least as far as
Archaic Greece. Found on the
Athenian acropolis, the sixth-century BC statue known as the
Rampin Rider depicts a
kouros mounted on horseback.
Ancient Middle and Far East A number of ancient
Egyptian,
Assyrian and
Persian
reliefs show mounted figures, usually rulers, though no free-standing statues are known. The Chinese
Terracotta Army has no mounted riders, though cavalrymen stand beside their mounts, but smaller
Tang dynasty pottery tomb Qua figures often include them, at a relatively small scale. No Chinese portrait equestrian statues were made until modern times; statues of rulers are not part of traditional Chinese art, and indeed even painted portraits were only shown to high officials on special occasions until the eleventh century.
Ancient Rome was once part of a large equestrian monument. .
Walters Art Museum,
Baltimore. Such statues frequently commemorated military leaders, and those statesmen who wished to
symbolically emphasize the active leadership role undertaken since Roman times by the equestrian class, the
equites (plural of
eques) or knights. There were numerous
bronze equestrian portraits (particularly of the emperors) in
ancient Rome, but they did not survive because they were melted down for reuse of the alloy as
coin,
church bells, or other, smaller projects (such as new sculptures for Christian churches); the standing
Colossus of Barletta lost parts of his legs and arms to Dominican bells in 1309. Almost the only sole surviving
Roman equestrian bronze, the
equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, owes its preservation on the
Campidoglio, to the popular misidentification of
Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-emperor, with
Constantine the Great, the Christian emperor. The
Regisole ("Sun King") was a bronze classical or Late Antique equestrian monument of a ruler, highly influential during the Italian Renaissance but destroyed in 1796 in the wake of the
French Revolution. It was originally erected at
Ravenna, but moved to
Pavia in the Middle Ages, where it stood on a column before the cathedral. A fragment of an equestrian portrait sculpture of
Augustus has also survived.
Medieval Europe (14th century), now replaced by a copy.
Scaliger Tombs in
Verona Equestrian statues were not very frequent in the
Middle Ages. Nevertheless, there are some examples, like the
Bamberg Horseman (German:
Der Bamberger Reiter), in
Bamberg Cathedral. Another example is the
Magdeburg Reiter, in the city of
Magdeburg, that depicts Emperor
Otto I. This is in stone, which is fairly unusual at any period, though the Gothic statues at less than life-size at the
Scaliger Tombs in
Verona are also in stone. There are a few roughly half-size statues of
Saint George and the Dragon, including the famous ones in
Prague and
Stockholm. A well-known small bronze
equestrian statuette of Charlemagne (or another emperor) in Paris may be a contemporary portrait of
Charlemagne, although its date and subject are uncertain. Bamberger Reiter Dom Bamberg P1330479.jpg|
Bamberg Horseman (1225–1237),
Bamberg Cathedral, stone Alter Markt (Magdeburg-Altstadt).Magdeburger Reiter.ajb.jpg|
Magdeburg Horseman (1240), Magdeburg Sv. Jiří a drak.jpg|St. George and Dragon (1373), Prague Riemenschneider Hl Georg.jpg|
Tilman Riemenschneider, Saint George (1490–1495) in
limewood,
Bode Museum Renaissance :
Statue of Gattamelata (1444–1453) After the Romans, no surviving monumental equestrian bronze was cast in Europe until 1415–1450, when
Donatello created the heroic bronze
equestrian statue of Gattamelata the
condottiere, erected in
Padua. In fifteenth-century Italy, this became a form to memorialize successful mercenary generals, as evidenced by the painted equestrian funerary monuments to
Sir John Hawkwood and
Niccolò da Tolentino in
Florence Cathedral, and the
statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni (1478–1488) cast by
Verrocchio in
Venice.
Leonardo da Vinci had planned a
colossal equestrian monument to the Milanese ruler, Francesco Sforza, but was only able to create a clay model. The bronze was reallocated for military use in the
First Italian War. Similar sculptures have survived in small scale:
The Wax Horse and Rider (–1508) is a fragmentary model for an equestrian statue of
Charles d'Amboise. The
Rearing Horse and Mounted Warrior in bronze was also attributed to Leonardo. Titian's equestrian portrait of
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, of 1548 applied the form again to a ruler. The
equestrian statue of Cosimo I de' Medici (1598) by
Giambologna in the center of
Florence was a life size representation of the Grand-Duke, erected by his son Ferdinand I. Ferdinand himself would be memorialized in 1608 with an equestrian
statue in Piazza della Annunziata was completed by Giambologna's assistant,
Pietro Tacca. Tacca's studio would produce such models for the rulers in France and Spain. His last public commission was the colossal equestrian bronze of
Philip IV, begun in 1634 and shipped to Madrid in 1640. In Tacca's sculpture, atop a fountain composition that forms the centerpiece of the façade of the Royal Palace, the horse rears, and the entire weight of the sculpture balances on the two rear legs, and discreetly, its tail, a novel feat for a statue of this size. Bartolomeo Colleoni by Andrea del Verrocchio.jpg|
Verrocchio:
Equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni (1480–1495) Saint George and the Dragon 2012.jpg|
Bernt Notke:
St George and the Dragon (1489), bronze replica of wooden sculpture, Stockholm Cosimo I (Florence) 2 2013 February.jpg|
Giambologna:
Equestrian statue of Cosimo I (1598) Madrid May 2014-33.jpg|
Pietro Tacca:
Monument to Philip IV of Spain (1634–1640)
Absolutism '' by
Étienne Maurice Falconet (1768–1782) During the age of
Absolutism, especially in
France, equestrian statues were popular with rulers;
Louis XIV was typical in having one outside his
Palace of Versailles, and the over life-size statue in the
Place des Victoires in Paris by
François Girardon (1699) is supposed to be the first large modern equestrian statue to be cast in a single piece; it was destroyed in the
French Revolution, though there is a small version in the
Louvre. The near life-size equestrian statue of
Charles I of England by
Hubert Le Sueur of 1633 at
Charing Cross in London is the earliest large English example, which was followed by many. The equestrian statue of King
José I of Portugal, in the
Praça do Comércio, was designed by
Joaquim Machado de Castro after the
1755 Lisbon earthquake and is a pinnacle of Absolutist age statues in Europe. The
Bronze Horseman (, literally "The Copper Horseman") is an iconic equestrian statue, on a huge base, of
Peter the Great of 1782 by
Étienne Maurice Falconet in
Saint Petersburg,
Russia. The use of French artists for both examples demonstrates the slow spread of the skills necessary for creating large works, but by the nineteenth century most large Western countries could produce them without the need to import skills, and most statues of earlier figures are actually from the nineteenth or early twentieth century. , Elector of Brandenburg, built 1696–1703
United States In the colonial era, an equestrian statue of
George III by English sculptor
Joseph Wilton stood on
Bowling Green in
New York City. This was the first such statue in the United States, erected in 1770 but destroyed on July 9, 1776, six days after the
Declaration of Independence. The gilded lead statue was toppled and cut into pieces, which were made into bullets for use in the
American Revolutionary War. Some fragments survived and in 2016 the statue was recreated for a museum. In the United States, the first three full-scale equestrian sculptures erected were
Clark Mills' Andrew Jackson (1852) in
Washington, D.C.;
Henry Kirke Brown's
George Washington (1856) in
New York City; and
Thomas Crawford's George Washington in
Richmond, Virginia (1858). Mills was the first American sculptor to overcome the challenge of casting a rider on a rearing horse. The resulting sculpture (of Jackson) was so popular he repeated it for
New Orleans,
Nashville, and
Jacksonville.
Cyrus Edwin Dallin made a specialty of equestrian sculptures of American Indians: his
Appeal to the Great Spirit stands before the
Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston. The
Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston is a well-known
relief including an equestrian portrait.
Twentieth century of
David of Sassoun, by
Yervand Kochar As the twentieth century progressed, the popularity of the equestrian monument declined sharply, as monarchies fell and the military use of horses virtually vanished. The
statue of Queen Elizabeth II riding Burmese in
Canada, and statues of
Rani Lakshmibai in
Gwalior and
Jhansi, India, are some of the rare portrait statues with female riders. (Although
Joan of Arc has been so portrayed a number of times, and an
equestrian statue of Queen Victoria features prominently in
George Square, Glasgow). In America, the late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed something of a revival in equestrian monuments, largely in the
Southwestern United States. There, art centers such as
Loveland, Colorado, Shidoni Foundry in
New Mexico, and various studios in
Texas once again began producing equestrian sculpture. in
Viljandi,
Estonia These revival works fall into two general categories, the memorialization of a particular individual or the portrayal of general figures, notably the American
cowboy or
Native Americans. Such monuments can be found throughout the American Southwest. In Glasgow, the sculpture of Lobey Dosser on El Fidelio, erected in tribute to
Bud Neill, is claimed to be the only two-legged equestrian statue in the world. == Tallest and largest equestrian statue ==