Horse and Rider (wax sculpture)

The pre-20th century history of Horse and Rider has not been established, with the first public attribution of the wax sculpture to Leonardo being made in 1987. or 1938. It was presented to a group of American businessmen in 1985. Vienna in 1996, and in Boston and Singapore in 1997. During the exhibition, several institutions were criticized by experts for displaying works of art - including Horse and Rider - as being by Leonardo, due to a lack of direct evidence. Due to its fragility, the wax statue remains in a temperature-controlled private collection in London. Leonardo da Vinci provenance According to Pedretti's attribution, the history of the sculpture is directly tied to Leonardo da Vinci. In 1506 Charles II d'Amboise summoned Leonardo to return to Milan from Florence. D'Amboise commissioned Leonardo to design the gardens for his suburban villa. From 1503 until the death of his patron in 1511 Leonardo developed the concept of an equestrian portrait of his patron and friend, Charles d'Amboise. Leonardo is known to have used wax models to study the compositions of his paintings, as noted by Benvenuto Cellini in reference to the sculptures in Milan and Florence. Upon Leonardo's death in 1519 his unfinished works, drawings and notebooks were inherited by Francesco Melzi, Leonardo's friend and protégé. The documents of the Melzi d'Eril family, who own Francesco's still existing Villa Melzi in Vaprio d'Adda, don't however have a record of the wax sculpture. ==Attribution and disputes==

The sculpture was attributed to Leonardo da Vinci by art historian Carlo Pedretti in 1985, and the bucking posture of one of the horses is similar to the sculpture. When exhibited at the Boston Museum of Science in 1997, the museum agreed to change the credit on the label of the sculpture from "by Leonardo" to "attributed to Leonardo", but art historian Jack Wasserman still insisted that nothing has survived to support the attribution. Art historians Pietro Marani and Franco Cardini, and art critic Vittorio Sgarbi, likewise doubted the sculpture's provenance when the bronze cast was exhibited in Milan in 2016, commenting that there still isn't adequate hard evidence to support the attribution of the work to Leonardo, and that Pedretti and Solari are often too generous with their attributions. Following his studies of medieval cavalry, Cardini also criticized the historical accuracy of the sculpture. ==Description==

The approximately high, long, and wide Historian hypothesizes that "this is a funeral monument. There are several clues that lead to this interpretation; the horse is portrayed disarranging the rider to indicate that the animal is frightened. It is going down to the underworld, while the knight Charles II d'Amboise, on the other hand is portrayed in a serene mood and eyes closed, the hand on his heart; the Governor of Milan is parting from his loved ones. Finally, one can notice the thigh protector in the shape of a shell, a symbol of travel, in this case without return." ==Bronze sculpture==

In 1987 art collector Richard A. Lewis acquired the 1985 latex mold. A Bloomberg article described the auction as a "flop". ==See also==