An equestrian statue is a statue of a rider mounted on a horse, from the Latin eques, meaning 'knight', deriving from equus, meaning 'horse'. A statue of a riderless horse is strictly an equine statue. A full-sized equestrian statue is a difficult and expensive object for any culture to produce, and figures have typically been portraits of rulers or, in the Renaissance and more recently, military commanders.
History
Ancient Greece
Equestrian statuary in the West dates back at least as far as Archaic Greece. Found on the Athenian acropolis, the sixth-century BC statue known as the Rampin Rider depicts a kouros mounted on horseback.
Ancient Middle and Far East
A number of ancient Egyptian, Assyrian and Persian reliefs show mounted figures, usually rulers, though no free-standing statues are known. The Chinese Terracotta Army has no mounted riders, though cavalrymen stand beside their mounts, but smaller Tang dynasty pottery tomb Qua figures often include them, at a relatively small scale. No Chinese portrait equestrian statues were made until modern times; statues of rulers are not part of traditional Chinese art, and indeed even painted portraits were only shown to high officials on special occasions until the eleventh century.
Ancient Rome
Such statues frequently commemorated military leaders, and those statesmen who wished to symbolically emphasize the active leadership role undertaken since Roman times by the equestrian class, the equites (plural of eques) or knights.
There were numerous bronze equestrian portraits (particularly of the emperors) in ancient Rome, but they did not survive because they were melted down for reuse of the alloy as coin, church bells, or other, smaller projects (such as new sculptures for Christian churches); the standing Colossus of Barletta lost parts of his legs and arms to Dominican bells in 1309. Almost the only sole surviving Roman equestrian bronze, the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, owes its preservation on the Campidoglio, to the popular misidentification of Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-emperor, with Constantine the Great, the Christian emperor. The Regisole ("Sun King") was a bronze classical or Late Antique equestrian monument of a ruler, highly influential during the Italian Renaissance but destroyed in 1796 in the wake of the French Revolution. It was originally erected at Ravenna, but moved to Pavia in the Middle Ages, where it stood on a column before the cathedral. A fragment of an equestrian portrait sculpture of Augustus has also survived.
Medieval Europe
Equestrian statues were not very frequent in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, there are some examples, like the Bamberg Horseman (German: Der Bamberger Reiter), in Bamberg Cathedral. Another example is the Magdeburg Reiter, in the city of Magdeburg, that depicts Emperor Otto I. There are a few roughly half-size statues of Saint George and the Dragon, including the famous ones in Prague and Stockholm. The Scaliger Tombs in Verona include Gothic statues at less than life-size. A well-known small bronze equestrian statuette of Charlemagne (or another emperor) in Paris may be a contemporary portrait of Charlemagne, although its date and subject are uncertain.
Renaissance
After the Romans, no surviving monumental equestrian bronze was cast in Europe until 1415–1450, when Donatello created the heroic bronze equestrian statue of Gattamelata the condottiere, erected in Padua. In fifteenth-century Italy, this became a form to memorialize successful mercenary generals, as evidenced by the painted equestrian funerary monuments to Sir John Hawkwood and Niccolò da Tolentino in Florence Cathedral, and the statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni (1478–1488) cast by Verrocchio in Venice.
Leonardo da Vinci had planned a colossal equestrian monument to the Milanese ruler, Francesco Sforza, but was only able to create a clay model. The bronze was reallocated for military use in the First Italian War. Similar sculptures have survived in small scale: The Wax Horse and Rider (c. 1506–1508) is a fragmentary model for an equestrian statue of Charles d'Amboise. The Rearing Horse and Mounted Warrior in bronze was also attributed to Leonardo.
Titian's equestrian portrait of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, of 1548 applied the form again to a ruler. The equestrian statue of Cosimo I de' Medici (1598) by Giambologna in the center of Florence was a life size representation of the Grand-Duke, erected by his son Ferdinand I.