Ippodromo di Milano - Leonardo's Horse
In 1999 the ambitious Leonardesque design project for the equestrian statue in honour of Francesco Sforza was placed in Milan's "Parco dell'Ippodromo". Room was made available by SNAI.The various planning stages and Leonardo's revolutionary ideas are illustrated by photographs and models with explanations in Italian, English and texts in Braille for the blind. The statue rests on a marble and granite structure with an innovative dual function: to emphasize the magnificence of the imposing statue without isolating it and maximise the total effect by permitting visitors to enjoy admiring the splendid background of Art Nouveau architecture. In 1482 the duke of Milan Lodovico il Moro, made Leonardo da Vinci an exceptional proposal. He asked the great artist to create the biggest equestrian statue in the world as a monument to his father Francesco who had been duke from 1452 to the year of his death in1466.Leonardo worked on this project, on and off, for sixteen years and managed to create a terracotta model seven metres high thus obtaining casts for the molten metal. During these years Leonardo had to devise a new fusion system to thicken the body surface of the horse, moulding it from a single cast of bronze
Political factors rendered this effort useless: in September 1499 the Duchy was invaded by the French under King Luigi XIIth and the experimental project and casts were lost without trace. Tradition has it that the gigantic clay model became the butt of the Gascon troups when they conquered Milan.
In 1977 Charles Dent conceived the idea of reviving Leonardo's plans for the realization of the horse and formulated the intention of donating the finished work of art to Italy and in particular to the city of Milan. Dent pursued this idea for sixteen years and succeeded in creating a preliminary model as much as two and a half metres high. He was unfortunately always short of money and looking for financial support for his initiative. Dent died in 1994 without managing to complete the project.
The work was taken in hand by the sculptress Nina Akamu who managed to complete the definitive model. All seven sections of the statue arrived in Milan in July 1999 where they were welded together. After some discussion the equestrian statue was placed at the entrance to the San Siro hippodrome on September the 9th1999.
