Regisole

According to different modern scholars the subject was either Theodoric the Great, King of the Ostrogoths (reigned 471–526),[2] "a Roman work of the third century AD",[2] or "possibly Septimius Severus, with several later modifications" (he was emperor 193–211).

[4] The Arab geographer Ibrāhīm al-Turtuši, who traveled to central-western Europe between 960 and 965 and who also visited Pavia, claims to have seen a large bronze equestrian statue placed near one of the doors of the Royal Palace.

[9] The Pavian bronze equestrian inspired 15th-century monuments such as the statues of the condottieri Gattamelata (which re-used the trick of adding a support under the raised leg of the horse, in this case a sphere instead of a dog) and Bartolomeo Colleoni.

[10] The historian Edward Gibbon, in passing through Pavia in May 1764, recorded details of the Regisole before its destruction: an equestrian statue of an emperor clad in chlamys and unarmed, leaning slightly forward and extending his arm in the attitude of an orator.

Without an inscription the monument was then being identified with Antoninus Pius, Constantine (whom the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius at Rome was long thought to represent) and Charles V, but Gibbon remarked that, unarmed and without a diadem, the latter two identifications were unlikely.