LEVADE CABRÉ HORSE, FROM APRÈS LÉONARD DE VINCI (1452-1519), LATE 16th / 17th CENTURY BROWN, investment casting. On a modern travertine base.
Prancing horse after Leonardo da Vinci,
late 16th/17th century, lost-wax bronze casting.

HIGH. 23.5 CM - WIDTH 27 CM

- DEPTH 12 CM - 9 1/4 X 10 5/8 X 4 3/4 IN. ProvenanceAncienne collection Pierre Jeannerat 1933A
rare testimony to
Leonardo da Vinci's late
sculpted work
.

The bronze horse, which we present here, belongs to a group whose prototype is the famous prancing horse with warrior of the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, Hungary. This group of bronze prancing horses has been studied extensively

since the early 20th century.

Our horse comes from the former collection of Pierre Jeannerat, a collector who was private secretary to Marshal Lyautey in Morocco. Having discovered this horse in London in 1933, he wrote an article about it in the magazine Apollo in 1934 (Vol XIX, pp. 312/316); since then, it has been studied on numerous occasions with several other models following the Budapest horse. Generally referred to by their city of residence as the New York horse (Metropolitan Museum), the Budapest horse (Budapest Museum of Fine Arts) and the Limmerick horse in Ireland (Hunt Museum). These three horses, together with the London horse or Jeannerat horse, constitute the initial group to which four variants will be added

in the last decades;

Considered in the first part of the 20th century, as coming from the workshop or hand of Leonardo da Vinci, these bronze horses are today recognised as bronze bronzes fused according to one or more models of clay or wax from

the master

's workshop

and disappeared since.

The Bronze Jeannerat or "London horse" is mentioned in more than seventeen publications devoted to this highly studied group since 1934. In 1961, it was exhibited successively at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and then at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, as part of a British Council exhibition devoted to Italian Renaissance bronze statuettes, in which the horse in the Jeannerat collection was chosen by John Pope-Hennessy to represent the group of horses associated with Leonardo da Vinci's work. Subsequently, most researchers will accept the hypothesis that these bronze horses were melted at several periods in succession.

The

Budapest horse is considered to be

the oldest of the group. The

posture of this prancing horse can be compared to a particular training figure, the levade, codified since the 16th century, where the animal is almost seated, very far back on its hind legs slightly open and very bent, hocks close to the ground and the body forming a

slight

angle

with the ground. The

twisted neckline and slightly offset front legs give this horse a realism and vigour that can be found in Leonardo da Vinci's drawings, preserved

in the British

royal collections

.

Several researchers see the origin of this model in a missing "model" that was modelled according to the instructions of the master's hand annotated above the drawing of a horse standing up on a preparatory sheet for the fresco of the Battle of Anghiari (unfinished and disappeared in 1511) or it states "make a small wax model, one finger long" (Drawing RCIN912328 recto, Royal

Collection Trust).

Other authors hypothesize that the horse's "sitting" position would be justified by the lowering of the centre of gravity and its repositioning towards the rear, which would be better able to support the weight of the colossal equestrian statue of Duke Sforza of Milan, an unfinished project whose small bronze horses would have taken up a model

. The

presence in Rome around 1520 of a model horse with an unusual sitting posture very close to the group studied is suggested by a horse seen from behind on a preparatory drawing of Raphael's workshop by Giovanni Francesco Penni (c.1496-1528) for the battle of Constantine against Maxentius in the Constantine Hall of the Vatican (Louvre Museum Inv. 3872

).

Stylistic, technical and metallurgical studies allow us to consider a dating at the end of the 16th / 17th century for the horse Jeannerat, which remains the only one of the initial group kept in private hands.