Module 7 - Leonardo's Horse

LEONARDO'S HORSE

Bibliographic Information

•           Fritz, J., & Talbott, H. (2001). Leonardo's horse. New York: Putnam.

Summary
Leonardo's Horse is a biographical picture book about the life and talent of Leonardo da Vinci, and of one of his projects that was not completed during his lifetime.  The book begins by recounting many of Leonardo's inventions and accomplishments, and how they all began as studies and sketches on paper.  Leonardo also loved horses, and studied them in their stables to sketch them.  He desired to build a statue of a horse that would be huge and powerful-looking, and completed a clay model that was later destroyed by the French army in an invasion.  Centuries passed, and a new patron found the plans, and built the statue in bronze to sit in the city of Milan.  The unveiling happened five hundred years after Leonardo's clay model was destroyed.

My Impressions
What a stunning group of illustrations!  This is a beautiful book that captures the romance and spirit of the Renaissance, the design process of the horse, and the unveiling ceremony.  I found it to be very romantic as a picture book, and a great historical lesson at the same time.

Reviews
Long, J. (2001). Leonardo's Horse. [Review of Leonardo's horse, by J. Fritz, & H. Talbott]. Horn Book Magazine, 77(5), 609-610.

In 1482, Leonardo da Vinci began work on a mammoth bronze horse. But though he completed a twenty-four-foot clay model, it was never cast, and the invading French destroyed it in 1499. Meanwhile, the artist's patron, the Duke of Milan, commandeered the bronze for armaments. Half a millennium later, retired pilot Charles Dent dedicated himself to re-creating Leonardo's dream, a venture eventually realized with the help of sculptor Nina Akamu. Fritz relates all this in her signature forthright style; unfortunately, her narrative, while engaging, begs several questions-notably, how much of Leonardo's original conception survived and how this twentieth-century homage was extrapolated from it. (The book does list a website that states that the completed sculpture is "faithful to Leonardo da Vinci's drawings," but there are otherwise no notes.) Nor does Fritz ever mention the original statue's role as a symbol of political power, or Leonardo's fascination with an engineering problem-casting such a massive figure-that may have been insoluble with technology available to him. Talbott's handsome illustrations are beautifully set off by the book's die-cut shape, which echoes both the dome that dominated fifteenth-century Florence and the one Dent constructed to house his project. But the art is no more forthcoming than the text. Talbott segues between Leonardo's sketches and his own impressionistic watercolors without a word of explanation. What is the reader to make of Talbott's Last Supper, in grisaille save for Leonardo himself, sitting in for Jesus as he tosses about his rejected sketches of Judas? Why is there no photograph of the finished horse? "At last Leonardo's horse was home," Fritz concludes. But what exactly makes it Leonardo's? That question is never addressed here. --Joanna Rudge Long

Library Usage
This is a great biographical study, at least for very young children, of Leonardo da Vinci so the book could be used for that purpose.  Also, inventions and art creations as a theme could include this book as well as a history of events in modern Italy.