Is This a `Lost' Leonardo?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 21, 1998 | by Mark Fondersmith

The youthful Leonardo da Vinci may have modeled this small bronze horse and used it as reference for a drawing in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Professional art historians disagree, but no sculptures by Leonardo exist for comparison.

Thanks to the generosity of his parents, an art student from Syracuse University spent the summer semester of 1973 in Florence. On his third day in that fabled city, the student was sketching in the Archeological Museum when his attention was riveted by a strangely familiar bronze horse. The small horse was being used to support a far more ancient bronze figure of a riding boy.

After a heart-stopping moment, the young student sprinted back to his lodgings and returned with Kenneth Clark's Leonardo da Vinci. Trembling, he opened the book to a page containing a silverpoint drawing by Leonardo. The drawing is considered to be the first sketch for the never-completed equestrian monument commissioned by the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza. It was as if he were gazing at the very horse upon which Leonardo had based this exquisite drawing almost 500 years earlier.

No known, or universally acknowledged, sculptures by Leonardo have survived. Could an aspiring art student have stumbled on a "lost" Leonardo sculpture in a public museum? It seemed too incredible to be true.

The student traced the outline of the saddle, the wrapped tail, the clipped mane, the turn of the head, the wrinkles on the neck, the general shape and the specific musculature of the horse. The similarities between the horse and the drawing seemed too numerous to be coincidental.

Yet the drawing was not a direct copy of the small bronze horse. It was as if Leonardo had moved slightly while he continued to draw. From a slightly higher vantage point the horse's head seemed to match the point-of-view of the drawing perfectly.

The silverpoint was a composite of several views of the bronze horse like Picasso's composite portraits that combine frontal and profile views.

The drawing seemed to be an exercise in problem-solving with the bronze as a point of departure. Leonardo's problem was how to support the enormous weight of the proposed Sforza rearing-horse monument. Leonardo had redrawn the front hooves to show how they might make contact with a supporting fallen warrior. The rider and the fallen warrior seemed to be sketchy additions to the drawing as if from Leonardo's imagination.

The art student continued to scan the drawing. He was looking for a link between the bronze and the drawing that would be unique to Leonardo.

There it was. A faint double line on the silverpoint drawing defined two wrinkles bordering a transition plane between the neck and the shoulder on the bronze. This was an unusual interpretation of equine anatomy. Could this detail be an indisputable link between the Leonardo signature drawing and the small bronze horse languishing in the Archeological Museum?

After graduation, that same art student wrote a Leonardo attribution proposal in turgid academic prose and brashly made an appointment with a distinguished art historian at the Johns Hopkins University. Egon Verheyen had recently written a book on the "lost" ceiling molding in Isabella d'Este's studio. The student naively thought the professor might be interested in a "lost" Leonardo da Vinci sculpture. After all, Isabella d'Este had once posed for a Leonardo portrait.

After wading through a few paragraphs of the thesis, Verheyen begged the student to get to the point. So the eager neophyte recounted his experience of the previous summer in Florence. He produced a reproduction of the silverpoint drawing by Leonardo in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle and a photograph of the small bronze rearing horse in Florence. The Archeological Museum identified the horse as coming from the "old Medici collection" but did not know the identity of the sculptor.

The bronze horse might have been modeled by the youthful Leonardo while an apprentice of Verroccio or shortly thereafter. Later, Leonardo might have used the small bronze horse as a reference for the drawing presented to Ludovico Sforza. "School of Leonardo" engravings, thought to be studies for the Sforza monument, were offered as visual links between Leonardo and the bronze.

When the student looked up from his proposal, Verheyen was frowning at the barren resume of his visitor. "Where" he asked, "did you find this sculpture?"

"In the Archeological Museum in Florence, Italy," the visitor replied.

"Do you really think it is plausible," Verheyen asked, "that hundreds of professional art historians have passed through the Archeological Museum, not to mention the museum curators, and that you and only you have noticed a Leonardo bronze on public display?"

"No," the young man agreed. "It doesn't seem very plausible."

The professor was frowning again at the student's resume. "How," he continued, "can you possibly hope to attribute a sculpture to Leonardo if you cannot speak Italian?"

"Because I can see Italian" the art student replied firmly.