Leonardo's horse

Seventy tons of bronze were collected by Ludovico for casting the statue, which approached 8 metres (26 ft) in height,[3] dwarfing earlier horse monuments by Donatello and by Leonardo's former master, Verrocchio.

Another treatise, titled Of Weight, included detailed plans for casting the statue,[7] which would have been done in separate hollow pieces and featured iron braces for internal support.

[3] In a 20 December 1493 note by Leonardo, he stated his readiness to begin the casting process, but in November 1494, Ludovico gave the bronze to his father-in-law Ercole d'Este to be used to forge cannons to defend the city from the invasion of Charles VIII.

[11][c] The clay model was used as an archery target by French soldiers when they invaded Milan in 1499 at the beginning of the Second Italian War; it was afterward destroyed by cycles of rains and subsequent freezes.

[3] In 1511, Leonardo undertook an equestrian monument as a tomb for Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, for which he again designed a rearing pose and supporting victim—but this was never modelled due to a confederation of Swiss, Spanish, and Venetian forces driving the French from Milan.

[12] In 1640, Pietro Tacca built the first equestrian monument featuring a (freestanding) rearing horse and King Philip IV of Spain, for which Galileo Galilei helped compute gravitational solutions—similar to Leonardo's—to deal with its offset weight.

Étienne Maurice Falconet's Bronze Horseman accomplishes a similar feat, although neither reach the physical scale of Leonardo's design.

Charles C. Dent, an amateur artist and flying enthusiast since his youth, strove to become a pioneering United Airlines pilot by profession as well as a dedicated art collector.

When Charles Dent died of Lou Gehrig's disease on December 25, 1994 he left his private art collection to LDVHI, the sale of which brought more than $1 million to the fund.

Leonardo had made numerous small sketches of horses to help illustrate his notes about the complex procedures for molding and casting the sculpture.

[25] Another 24-foot-high recreation (7.3 m) of the Sforza horse, based on different design interpretation, was manufactured by the Opera Laboratori Fiorentini S.p.A., in collaboration with Polo Museale Fiorentino and the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence, Italy.