Equestrian statue

A full-sized equestrian statue is a difficult and expensive object for any culture to produce, and figures have typically been portraits of rulers or, in the Renaissance and more recently, military commanders.

Although there are outliers, the form is essentially a tradition in Western art, used for imperial propaganda by the Roman emperors, with a significant revival in Italian Renaissance sculpture, which continued across Europe in the Baroque, as mastering the large-scale casting of bronze became more widespread, and later periods.

[2] 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.

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.

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.

[3] Similar sculptures have survived in small scale: The Wax Horse and Rider (c. 1506–1508) is a fragmentary model for an equestrian statue of Charles d'Amboise.

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.

In the colonial era, an equestrian statue of George III by English sculptor Joseph Wilton stood on Bowling Green in New York City.

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.

(Although Joan of Arc has been so portrayed a number of times,[8] and an equestrian statue of Queen Victoria features prominently in George Square, Glasgow).

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.

Also on a huge scale, the carvings on Stone Mountain in Georgia, the United States, are equestrian sculpture rather than true statues, the largest bas-relief in the world.

[14] For example, Richard the Lionheart is memorialised, mounted passant, outside the Palace of Westminster by Carlo Marochetti; the former died 11 days after his wound, sustained in siege, turned septic.

A survey of 15 equestrian statues in central London by the Londonist website found that nine of them corresponded to the supposed rule, and considered it "not a reliable system for reading the fate of any particular rider".