Eventos en Milán y alrededores: detalle

From 01 Enero 2010 to 31 Diciembre 2012

Leonardo's Horse - Hotel Vittoria Milan

This titanic statue of a horse, erected just outside San Siro Hippodrome in Milan, represents the culmination of an ambitious dream hatched 500 years ago by Leonardo da Vinci.

This massive imago equus is seven metres tall, more than eight metres long and weighs in at over 15 tons, all solid bronze. It is a proud, powerful specimen indeed, an impressive legacy of the great mind that conceived it.

The history of this artefact is an incredible one. The story began 500 years ago, when the Lord of Sforza ordered his court technician, Leonardo da Vinci, to conceive of the greatest statue ever built. Duly, the visionary mastermind dreamed up a gigantic monument, a horse, that would defy the limits of technology in his day and age: a sublime fusion of art and technology, blended in the powerful figure of the horse, instrument and catalyst of man's technological ascendancy. His vision, however, never crystallised: in 17 years of residence in Milan all he ever completed was a series of drawings and sketches, in his unmistakable spidery but incredibly precise hand.

In 1977, almost 500 years later, ex-airline pilot Charles Dent read of the frustrated dream in National Geographic, and was immediately enthralled with the idea of finishing Leonardo's incomplete project himself. The statue would then be given to Italy, to signify a repayment of the debt the entire world owed the country for the Italian Renaissance.

He set up a foundation, Leonardo da Vinci's Horse Inc, to collect funds for the enterprise, but immediately ran into problems. Many of the documents had been lost, and what was left were some highly incomplete sketches. Undeterred, Dent assembled a panel of Leonardian scientists to reconstruct the plan of the great man, but even with their help the project took more than 20 years. Dent himself never saw the finished work: he died, with the statue still on the drawing board, in 1994.

In 1999 the pieces of the work that had taken more than two decades to assemble were finally fused together, under the supervision of sculptress Nina Akamu, and the statue can now be admired in all its gargantuan glory.


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