Painting portraits, supervising pageants, small engineering jobs

We have seen Leonardo fulfilling the chief duties of an artist at a Renaissance court, painting portraits, supervising pageants and doing those small engineering jobs which demanded unusual resource and skill in the handling of materials. In addition to these duties he undertook for the Duke two works which exacted the whole measure of his genius, the Horse and the Last Supper.

The Horse is the title by which contemporaries always referred to his model for the equestrian monument to Ludovico's father, the great condottiere Francesco Sforza. Such a monument had first been attempted in 1473 under Duke Galeazzo Maria, and after his death in 1476 the idea was taken up with enthusiasm by Ludovico. By the time Leonardo went to Milan it had become a symbolical undertaking, involving group prestige, like the building of a giant liner to-day. Leonardo may have had some hope of being employed on the work, since he mentions it at the end of the letter to Ludovico in which he recommends himself as a military engineer. "Again, I can undertake to work on the bronze horse which will be a monument to the immortal glory and eternal honour of your father the Prince, and the illustrious house of Sforza." There is no evidence that he had been offered the commission or that it was the chief motive of his journey to Milan, but when he had proved his competence in various kinds of work he was evidently ordered to try his hand at the monument. If Sabba Castiglione is right in saying that he worked on it for sixteen years, he must have begun it in 1483. His first conception is known to us from an engraving and two drawings (Windsor 12,357, 12,358), which on grounds of style are datable before 1490. They show that in this early stage Leonardo had conceived the horse as prancing, in a pose similar to those which he had just studied in the background of the Adoration, but simpler and less twisted.

We know how strongly this sequence of forms appealed to him and we can imagine how eager he was to carry it out in sculpture, where its full plastic possibilities could be realised. At that date no equestrian statue with a prancing horse can have been known, and if he could have executed one Leonardo would have surpassed in technical skill not only the recent glories of the Gattamelata and Colleoni monuments, but even the masterpieces of antiquity. But his ambition far outran his experience. The two drawings mentioned show no attempt to meet the problems of monumental sculpture. In one the horse's raised forefeet are supported by an inadequate and unconvincing tree-trunk; in the other they rest on a prostrate foe, a motive common in antique reliefs, but far too complicated and unsubstantial for large-scale sculpture in the round. Even if Leonardo's designs had been more sculptural, such a complete group could hardly have been cast in bronze at that date, and it is surprising that Leonardo, with his experience of casting cannon, did not realise this. But this disregard for media of execution marked all his most important works. The Last Supper, the Battle of Anghiari, the canalisation of the Arno were all damaged or even annihilated by this defect, which sprang not only from impatience and experimentalism but from a certain romantic unreality. By 1489 Ludovico had either realised or been informed of the impracticability of Leonardo's design, and through the Florentine ambassador in Milan he wrote to Lorenzo de' Medici asking him to recommend one or two masters more apt for the work. At about this period Leonardo gave up work on the horse. Apparently Lorenzo made no satisfactory recommendation; and on 23 April 1490 Leonardo notes, ricominciai il cavallo.

This time he seems to have realised that the project of a rearing horse was too ambitious, and returned to the traditional pose of a horse walking. There is good evidence of what this horse was to be like. It is shown complete in a small sketch in the right-hand bottom corner of a drawing at Windsor, No. 12,317, and in a red chalk sketch in the Codice Atlantico, f. 216 verso, a, where it is shown packed for transport, Leonardo taking his usual delight in the technical devices involved. Some drawings from nature at Windsor indicate the disposition of its limbs, and these hints of the pose are confirmed by representations of horses in contemporary bronzes and illuminated manuscripts which are almost certainly derived from the Sforza monument. The most interesting of all these reminiscences is the horse in Dürer's engraving of the Knight and the Devil which was probably inspired by one of Leonardo's final drawings for the monument. All these indications show a pose in strong contrast with the original project. Leonardo has not attempted to rival the recent triumph of his master, the nervous swaggering Colleoni, but has gone back to Donatello's Gattamelata, with its slow-pacing horse giving the authority of movement appropriate to a great commander. But Leonardo's horse is lighter and more classical, partly owing to the influence of the antique bronzes then known, the Regisole at Pavia and the horses of St Mark, and partly to the living models which he found in the Sforza stables. Some of the beautiful drawings done from nature at this time. This series of nature studies, for the most part in silverpoint, shows Leonardo's style at its most attractive. The observation is delicate and direct; the handling fresh and decisive, without the slow deliberation which takes the bloom from his later drawings of horses. They were made between 1490 and 1493. In July 1493 Leonardo was still taking notes of horses worth drawing, and that autumn he constructed a full-scale model in clay. On 30 November this model was exhibited at festivities held on the marriage of Bianca Maria Sforza to the Emperor Maximilian. It was described by Giovio 2 but in general terms which do not help us: "in cujus vehementer incitati ac anhelantis habitu et statuariae artis et rerum naturae eruditio summa deprehenditur."

Leonardo had for some time been considering the casting of his colossus and has left several drawings relating to the work. But the casting did not take place. On 17 November 1494, Ludovico sent the whole of the bronze collected for the horse to his brother-in-law, Ercole d'Este. It was made into cannon. The full-scale model continued to stand in the Corte Vecchia of the Castello, where it was seen and admired by many famous visitors to Milan, who refer to it and the Last Supper in almost equal terms. According to Bandello Leonardo continued to work on it while painting the Last Supper, and this is confirmed by Sabba Castiglione's statement quoted above. We have no evidence that Ludovico revived the project of casting it in bronze, and Leonardo does not again refer to work on it, but in an incoherent and fragmentary letter to the Duke he writes del cavallo non dico niente perche cognosco i tempi. When the French entered Milan the connoisseurs expressed much admiration for the model: but the soldiers used it as a target. Finally it was taken to the Court of Ferrara, where it decomposed.