Informational Books - Leonardo’s Horse by Jean Fritz, Hudson Talbott (Illustrator)

Module 11: Leonardo’s Horse by Jean Fritz, Hudson Talbott (Illustrator)

Summary: Leonardo’s Horse is the story of Leonardo da Vinci’s unfulfilled dream of constructing a 24-foot-tall horse for the duke of Milan.  The duke of Milan wanted a horse constructed in front of his palace to honor his father.  Leonardo da Vinci wanted to be the one to make it and submitted his resume to show that he was capable of doing it.  In 1482, he was given the job. In order to determine his design, he went to horse stables to study and draw horses and examined other statues of horses.  But the duke wanted a horse three times bigger than originally planned, and Leonardo had to configure the engineering and materials needed to build such a large horse. He constructed a 24-four feet high clay model that was displayed at one of the Duke’s special occasions in 1493.  However, Leonardo did not seem to be in a hurry to finish the job.  He had so many other duties at the palace and only worked on the horse when he had time.  In 1499, the French came and attacked Milan and destroyed his horse along with the rain. Leonardo da Vinci never completed the horse and died in the year 1519.  But in 1977, Charles Dent read the story about the horse that was never constructed in a magazine.  He decided that he would construct Leonardo’s horse.  By 1993, an eight-foot plaster model of clay was completed and ready to be cast into a 24-foot bronze horse.  Sadly, Charles Dent died the following year unable to fulfill this dream, but his friends and family promised to complete it.  They hired the talented New York sculptor, Nina Akamu to complete it. She worked on it from 1995-1999.  The final 24-foot sculpture was revealed in 1999 and stood on a pedestal in a small park in front of Milan’s famous racetrack.  Finally, Leonardo’s horse was home.    

     

My Perspective: This story reveals another side of Leonardo da Vinci.  The author discusses Leonardo da Vinci’s great curiosity in all subjects. “He was an engineer, an architect, a musician, a philosopher, an astronomer” (Fritz, J., 2001, p. 5). He enjoyed beginning projects, but the implication is that he rarely completed projects.  According to Fritz (2001) in the middle of painting a mural in Florence he stopped to “let someone else finish it” (p.7).  After making the 24-foot clay model of the horse, “Leonardo seemed to be in no hurry to start casting” (p. 18).  In painting the Last Supper, “he left Judas for someone else to do” (p. 18).  That seemed to be the reason he never completed the construction of this horse.  And yet, he seemed to regret that it had never been finished as he wept for his horse on his deathbed (p. 23).  The work was picked up by Charles Dent in 1977, but he also was unable to see the dream realized.  Finally, an artist and the foundation that Charles Dent started completed the work as a gift from America to Italy.  However, the horse done by Nina Akamu, was not Dent’s original as she had to fix the proportions and scaling.  The book has a unique shape and the artwork by Hudson Talbott presents this renaissance artist work using multimedia artwork that includes reproductions of da Vinci's notebooks. The dome shaped book becomes “a window through which da Vinci views a cloud shaped like a flying horse; the domed building that was Dent's studio and gallery; and a globe depicting the route the bronze horse travels on its way from the U.S. to Italy.” (Publisher Weekly Review, 2001).  Anyone who is a fan of Leonardo da Vinci will enjoy reading this story as it unfolds an aspect of him that is not well known. 

Library Application: Leonardo da Vinci was an engineer, an architect, a musician, a philosopher, an astronomer. This book can be incorporated into a STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics) project. Students can build and test Leonardo da Vinci’s parachute (Fritz, J.,2001, p. 8).  Students can practice sketching animals (p.12, 28, 32).  Scale from a model of an object to make it three times larger (p. 13). Build a 3-D clay model (p.15). And they can even cast a plaster horse using Eyewitness Horse Kit (p. 35).

References:

Fritz, J. (2001). Leonardo’s Horse. New York:  G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Publisher’s Weekly Review (2001, October 1). [Review of Leonardo’s Horse]. Retrieved from https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-399-23576-4