The Horse: From Cave Paintings to Modern Art

AB OUT THE AUTHOR S

    is one of the most successful riders ever to represent the U.S. equestrian team in international competition. During the  Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Fargis won the show jumping individual gold medal and the team gold medal. He is only the second U.S. athlete to win an individual gold medal in show jumping. He was also a member of the silver medal show jumping team during the  Summer Olympics in Seoul and won a team gold medal at the  Pan American Games in Mexico City.

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Landscape Painting

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Orientalism in Art

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Chaudun Christe Francfort Gouraud Héran Libourel Morineau Peltre Roche Vernay-Nouri Vialou Wagner Woronoff

THE HORSE

-       is a writer and editor. -  is a historian and Germanist.   is professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris.   is the director of Central Asian Archaeology CNRS Research Institute.   is honorary president of the University of Franche-Comte and a professor emeritus at the Faculté de Lettres.   is an art history professor at the University of Geneva.  - is conservator at the department of eastern manuscripts at the National Library of France.   is a professor at the Collège de France. -  is the chief curator at Patrimoine.   is an art historian and editor.   is a professor of art history at the University of Strasbourg.   is a curator at the Musée d’Orsay.   is a curator at the Centre Pompidou.

THE HORSE From Cave Paintings to Modern Art

  /

T H E H O RSE

From Cave Paintings to Modern Art

F

rom the caves at Lascaux to the European race tracks of Degas to the American West of Frederic Remington, the horse has never ceased to inspire the human imagination. Once omnipresent—on the battlefield, in agricultural work, and in transport— horses have little by little disappeared from our immediate environment, but they remain fixtures throughout our museums, atop pedestals in our town squares, and in the landscapes of memory.

Transcending genres, places, and eras, specialists on the history of the horse and its representation in art create an ideal panorama on the subject, guiding us through the rich legacy of The Horse: From Cave Paintings to Modern Art. With these scholars we cross the principal continents from east to west and from prehistory to the present day, examining the rich history of the horse in art, which illustrates how dearly horses have been prized by all human societies fortunate enough to encounter them.

The artistic styles represented in this book offer something for every taste. There are cave paintings and sculptures, medieval illuminated manuscripts and photographs, and depictions of battle and scenes of leisure. Uccello, Rubens, Van Dyck, Velázquez, Géricault, Stubbs, David, and Picasso are among the  artists featured in this in-depth study. As the more than three hundred images in this precious volume diversely illustrate, the horse is as beautiful an animal as it has been useful—indeed, central—to the development of human society.

Printed in Singapore

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The Horse From Cave Paintings to Modern Art N i colas Chaudu n , Y ve s C h r i ste , H e n r i -P a u l Fr a n c f or t Jean-Loui s Gour au d , E mma n u e l l e H é r a n , Je a n -L o u i s L i b ou r e l Cami lle Mor i n e a u , C h r i sti n e P e l tr e , D a n i e l R o c h e Ann ie Vern ay-N o u r i , De n i s Vi a l o u , M a r c -An d r é W agn e r , M i c h e l W o r o n o ff

Abbeville Press Publishers n e w y o r k Lo n d o n

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45 Painted horses (Upper Paleolithic period) Central panel of the Chauvet Cave, detail Vallon-Pont-d’Arc (Ardèche)

short legs, thick withers, and a head leaning forward with no visible movement. Considering the portrayal of its limbs—skillfully drawn in perspective as the Magdalenians did so well, long before the rediscovery of trompe l’oeil during the Renaissance—the animal is at a standstill, and its depiction is particularly hieratic compared to other, more restless horses, bison, and ibex.

The horse illustrated in the middle of a row of six horses, in a beautiful limestone shelter in Périgord, Cap Blanc, is peaceful and powerful in its own way. Seven feet (2.1 m) in length, it was sculpted in heavy bas-relief and chiseled to emphasize the anatomical details of the head.

Like the adjacent figures, it appears to emerge from the wall; to extract itself from the matter. An indication of this is in the ear, which points high and forward, making it the most detached part of the rock. This impressionist touch, one might dare say, which distinguishes the work from a pure reproduction of nature in order to emphasize the most vibrant visual and sensual impression, can be observed in a horse that is portrayed using a completely diVerent technical style found in Les Combarelles, not far from Le Cap Blanc. This illustration is from roughly the same Magdalenian period a bit before the Niaux period.

the horse 

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EQUESTRIAN MYTHS Pegasus is certainly considered the archetype of mythological horses; indeed, he was indispensable in helping Bellerophon fight the Chimera and the Amazons. ProtoCorinthian vases depict Bellerophon, astride Pegasus, confronting the monster. Furthermore, his image was minted on many ancient Corinthian coins (640 bc). A terra-cotta statuette from Melos (450 bc) portrays him attacking the Chimera with his legs folded over Pegasus’s back, depicted without wings. The obverse side of a stater from Taranto shows a winged Pegasus flying freely. A coin from Ambracia (370 bc) reveals a man crouching down examining Pegasus’s hoof.

Of the many myths associated with horses, one of the strangest involves centaurs, those half-horse, half-human creatures descended from Ixion and the cloud nymph Nephele. They are portrayed as dual creatures: either very wise beings, or nearly akin to animals. Drunken centaurs broke the laws of hospitality at the wedding of Pirithous, the Lapith king, and attempted to run oV with the bride. Theseus and Apollo had to intervene in order to restrain their brutish ardor. This scene is portrayed on the west facade of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. A Corinthian skyphos (590–580 bc) depicts drunken centaurs. This taste for violence is a recurring

theme in representations of centaurs, as is their sexual appetite: the centaur Nessus attempted to rape Deianira, wife of Heracles, while helping her cross a river, but he 83 was taken down by the hero. A scene painted on a bowl

by Aristophanes shows Nessus kidnapping Deianira and young Heracles striking him with his bludgeon.

The earliest representations of centaurs are a clay statuette from Eretria dating back to the late tenth century bc (a good century before the masterpiece The Iliad, c. 750 bc), a geometric vase from Rhodes dating slightly later, and a statuette. The centaurs in these pieces have human legs and the hindquarters of a horse. The Fran85 çois vase (570 bc) illustrates them in a centauromachia.

Other centaurs, having become quadrupeds but still hostile, are found on the southern metopes of the Parthenon, the western frieze of the Hephaisteion in Athens, the eastern frieze of the temple in Bassae, and the frieze of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. The painter Zeuxis (fifth century bc) was the first to have depicted a female centaur. Subsequently, the bestial aspects of the centaurs were characterized by tousled hair, a shaggy beard, a turned-up nose, and horse-like ears. The Florence Painter also portrayed a centaur brandishing a large vase against a Lapith who is punching him. This theme would be taken up again, without many changes, throughout the Roman era. Centaurs lived in the

83  Heracles killing the centaur Nessus (late 7th century bc) Detail of the Nessus Painter Attic ceramic amphora Athens, National Archaeological Museum of Athens 82  The Diosphos Painter (fl. 5th century bc) Amazon and hoplite fighting (c. 500–490 bc) Archaic black-figure painting of a neck-amphora 4K × 7G in. (11 × 18.3 cm) Nola (Greater Greece) Paris, Musée du Louvre

84  West facade of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia (5th century bc) Detail of Apollo and a centaur Greece

greek and roman antiquity 

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MEDIEVAL ART 300–1400 Yves Christe

T

he period of the Middle Ages is said to have been the golden age of the horse. This is undoubtedly true for horse dealers and breeders, which were often major abbeys, and for the knight fortunate enough to seize possession of his adversary’s mount. Given the price of this animal and the cost of its maintenance and its trappings, the term “golden age” may in fact be accurate.

The situation from the horse’s point of view, however, was a diVerent story. But for the fact that it was a “dumb beast,” the animal could have classified this period as an “iron age,” if only because of the brutality of the steel that was put into its mouth and the spurs, rarely of gold, that raked its sides. The blood-spotted coats of the chargers in the Maciejowski Bible, also known as the Bible of the Crusades, bear witness to the lack of moderation in the use of this device. Since the horse that first rose to importance was the charger—a “large horse,” or specifically a warhorse—the felicitous description given by author Philippe Contamine is perhaps better: “The Middle Ages is the age of the horse,” the age of the people who rode them.

The narrative frieze around the Arch of Constantine the infantry, even if not in large numbers. This was not a in Rome plunges us immediately into the heart of the light cavalry, but rather a heavy cavalry, sometimes mailsubject. It summarizes in six tableaux the Italian camclad, with knights and horses—Sarmatian or Roman— paign of the first Christian emperor, from the taking of 109 completely covered with scale-armor. Trajan’s Column Verona to the formal ceremonies following his victory in Rome (second century) already provides a fairly over Maxentius at the gates of Rome in October ad 313. precise image of this type of Sarmatian knight turning We are thus not surprised to find Constantine’s draaround to shoot an arrow as he flees. goons, with their eponymous standard, in the famous The barbarians who invaded the Roman Empire 120 Saint Gall Psalterium aureum, a sumptuous ninth-century were preceded by columns of mobile and lightly armed manuscript that contains one of the oldest representaknights. The Roman army, itself by now largely comtions of a knight using a stirrup. Thus at the end of posed of barbarians, had to adapt in order to fight them. antiquity, the cavalry is shown to take precedence over As barbarian kingdoms were being established

119  The month of August Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry Workshop of the Limbourg brothers (c. 1440–50) Detail of the illumination, on vellum 11K × 8G in. (29 × 21 cm) Chantilly, Musée Condé 120  Carolingian “dragoons” Illustration in the Saint Gall Psalterium aureum (9th century) Abbey Library of Saint Gall, Switzerland, ms 22

14

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but the artist’s choice illustrates how it was suitable for the temperament of horse and rider to be identified with each other. In this way the artist evokes the ability of both to join forces in combat, whatever the terrain. The horse that Bonaparte urges on not only holds the attention of all, but is there to show history on the move, beyond mountains and obstacles. David thoroughly knew his masters—Leonardo da Vinci, undoubtedly, and all the great artists who attempted to associate intellectual knowledge and observation through the study of movement and models, bringing together the illusionistic aesthetic of motion and the calm idealism of great classical art. The important thing was to reveal, through impassiveness, the power of command. The ideas of Antoine-François Vincent, who was familiar with studies of the lives of the great modern sculptors—Antoine Coysevox, Guillaume Coustou, Falconet—served to inspire David’s sense of observation, including the expression of equine passions. Bonaparte’s horse thus conveys anger and vengeance, since it is furious and rearing, but lacks independence. The spirit and finality of David’s painting transpose a desire to immortalize the established connection between war and power into politics transformed by the Revolution.

The relationship of the horse to art is not restricted to military painting or to the symbolism evoked by people and horses reduced to obedience. Whether walking or leaping, in marble or bronze, on canvas, paper, or in tapestry, horses are both real and symbolic actors in representational struggles that are inseparable from social and political clashes. Observing them and their work, like the tumult of battle, can be part of an artist’s background.

The military horseman, the king on horseback, cavalry charges and their chaos—all associate the image of victorious mastery with the accessories of weaponry and with the weapon of law.⁵² Painting and sculpture were symbolic tools, capable of conveying all types of formal investigations, which can be observed from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, in the way in that the subject is depicted and in the choice of restrained gait that is portrayed, up to the photographic analyses of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, which allowed simple movements to be freed from their dynamic context. Their work opened up paths of speed and kinetics for art, making other allegories possible. And so in the Futurist painter Umberto Boccioni’s Charge of the Lancers (1915), the battle horse, about to exit the military stage and experience its final charge in the clashes of World War I, becomes the object of aesthetic speculation,

200  after Pierre Mignard Louis XIV dressed in Roman style, crowned by Victory with the city of Maastricht in the background in 1673 (1673) Oil on canvas 10 ft. 2K in. × 10 ft.

(311 × 304 cm) Versailles, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon

201  Guillaume Coustou the Elder (1677–1746) Horse Restrained by a Groom, also known as the Marly Horse (1745) Marble 111I × 139I × 50 in.

(284 × 355 × 127 cm) Paris, Musée du Louvre

war 

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215 James Pollard (1792–1867) John Smith Barry’s Private Drag and Greys Team at Marbury Hall, Cheshire (1824) Oil on canvas 36 × 48 in. (91.3 × 121.9 cm) New Haven, Connecticut, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

The lightweight high-flying phaeton, a purely English invention that appeared shortly before 1780, consisted of nothing more than a very tall box with a tiny seat at the top, on spectacular vertical springs. During the closing years of the century it was extremely popular with wealthy young people who loved driving and horsepower, for the excessive height and speed of the highflyer phaetons made them very dangerous. Symbols of the arrogance and self-conceit of privileged idle youth, they were often mocked by the caricaturists of the time in drawings with biting humor.

Their dangerousness is the subject depicted by Agasse, in journalistic fashion, in An Unpleasant Situation—a painting depicting an accident that happened to him while taking a drive at the reins of his phaeton, superbly harnessed to four white horses with cut tails. Terrified by the barking dog barring their path, the lead horses of the

team have escaped the control of their master and have pulled to the left, oV the road, dragging the entire team behind them. Refusing to advance, the petrified wheelers have halted abruptly and are rearing. The carriage has gone up onto the shoulder of the road and is about to turn over. A broken rein of the leader is dragging on the ground. With the team deprived of guidance and the carriage perilously oV balance, an accident is unavoidable. This unfortunate personal adventure provided Agasse with an opportunity to paint a team in a completely new way. While the horses are still stereotyped in terms of their shape, their various postures and movements reveal their individual personalities.

The use and the ostentatiousness of the carriage reached its peak in the nineteenth century. More and more people took to driving their carriages themselves, in search of an intoxicating sensation: the pleasure of

the horse 

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317  André Masson (1896–1987) Metaphysical Bullfight (1936) Oil on canvas Private collection 318  Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Corrida: Death of the Torero (1933) Oil on canvas 12G × 18I in. (31 × 40 cm) Paris, Musée Picasso 319  Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Guernica (1937) Oil on canvas 11H × 25H ft. (3.49 × 7.76 m) Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia

own right, is later disemboweled by a bull. In short, far from being a traditional tribute to the torero, Picasso’s bullfights incorporate a chain of identification processes and role reversals that say more about the artist’s life and his vision of the world than about what might happen at a bullfight. Brigitte Léal explores in detail the many instances where woman and horse are likened, from the 319 beginning of the century to Guernica (1937), including the disquieting portraits of women made between 1927–29.⁵ The bombing of the small Basque city of Guernica on Monday, April 27, 1937, outraged Picasso. He decided at the last moment to depict the event for the monumental commission the government of the Republic gave him at the beginning of the year for the Spanish Pavilion at the Exposition Internationale in Paris. The final piece, Guernica, epitomized the pairing of the bull and the horse, giving each animal an incredible symbolic force.

Their fatal matchup in classic bullfighting turns into solidarity as they confront both enemy and anxiety. They embody wounded Spain, struggling to keep its head high in the face of its crisis. However, while the figure of the bull was relatively stable in the painting’s gestation, the horse was constantly revised. Every possible deformation was studied in order to best express fear and suVering; its head was eventually so well rendered that it seems the horse is both falling prey to atrocity and resisting death.

the horse 

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conflict in the twentieth century 

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finally horsemen. These would remain common themes in his work after an existential crisis triggered by the war: while before the war, man clearly dominated animal, after, he merged more and more with his mount. This new centaur was tinged with worry, even with tragedy: the image of an end of European humanist culture.

The rider and his horse were therefore introduced and reintroduced throughout the century. A symbolic horsemachine from an industrial century that subjugated man; a humanity weakened by war and corrupted by brutality that found a weighty symbol in the centaur and the minotaur; a constant back and forth between a fascination with antiquity and classicism and their subversion: these tendencies yielded a wide range of horseman images. The Centaur (Homage to Picasso) (1983) by César, a replica of which stands at the entrance of the Red Cross in Paris, perfectly embodies the persistence of the motif and the manner in which it irrigated some of the century’s essential questions. A figure of authority and the symbol of a certain vision of art, man and his horse have been approached with a certain irony by contemporary artists: Xavier Veilhan’s The Republican Guard (1995), depicts four, life-size figures in color of these somewhat outdated guardians of order. It also pokes at an entire tradition of public monuments. “The idea of The Republican Guard,” according to the artist, “was above all to oVer the public a piece that was literally the image of the State, in a static manner. I try to restore a kind of fascination for dynamic elements, even if today they are based on a ‘shattered’ mode, without direction. What interests me is using this dynamic, within a postulate that a work represents, in order to create a form.”

This integration of the horseman-centaur icon in Europe found its counterpart abroad in the figure of the cowboy, as he was promoted in film and advertising. As part of a culture influenced by Pop Art in which image dominated, the rider reemerged in photography, for example, in Richard Prince’s famous series Marlboro Men and Untitled Cowboy (1989). These are rephotographs of cowboys, heroes of the American West, used to promote cigarettes. Prince reframed the images, removed the slogans, and unified the scale as a critique on the exploitation of heroism in advertising and the degradation of moral values by the power of money.

The rebellion against the paragon of classicism that the horse represents was energized by the fact that the motif persisted in its classical form and even blossomed in the work of many artists who built their reputation on it. Races, riders, and centaurs have been prominent

323 Marino Marini (1901–1980) Horse and Rider Bronze Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna

conflict in the twentieth century 

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AB OUT THE AUTHOR S

    is one of the most successful riders ever to represent the U.S. equestrian team in international competition. During the  Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Fargis won the show jumping individual gold medal and the team gold medal. He is only the second U.S. athlete to win an individual gold medal in show jumping. He was also a member of the silver medal show jumping team during the  Summer Olympics in Seoul and won a team gold medal at the  Pan American Games in Mexico City.

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM ABBEVILLE PRESS

Landscape Painting

By Nils Büttner  ---- · $.

Orientalism in Art

By Christine Peltre  ---- · $. AB B E V ILLE P R ESS  Varick Street New York, NY  --A (in U.S. only) Available wherever fine books are sold Visit us at

Chaudun Christe Francfort Gouraud Héran Libourel Morineau Peltre Roche Vernay-Nouri Vialou Wagner Woronoff

THE HORSE

-       is a writer and editor. -  is a historian and Germanist.   is professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris.   is the director of Central Asian Archaeology CNRS Research Institute.   is honorary president of the University of Franche-Comte and a professor emeritus at the Faculté de Lettres.   is an art history professor at the University of Geneva.  - is conservator at the department of eastern manuscripts at the National Library of France.   is a professor at the Collège de France. -  is the chief curator at Patrimoine.   is an art historian and editor.   is a professor of art history at the University of Strasbourg.   is a curator at the Musée d’Orsay.   is a curator at the Centre Pompidou.

THE HORSE From Cave Paintings to Modern Art

  /

T H E H O RSE

From Cave Paintings to Modern Art

F

rom the caves at Lascaux to the European race tracks of Degas to the American West of Frederic Remington, the horse has never ceased to inspire the human imagination. Once omnipresent—on the battlefield, in agricultural work, and in transport— horses have little by little disappeared from our immediate environment, but they remain fixtures throughout our museums, atop pedestals in our town squares, and in the landscapes of memory.

Transcending genres, places, and eras, specialists on the history of the horse and its representation in art create an ideal panorama on the subject, guiding us through the rich legacy of The Horse: From Cave Paintings to Modern Art. With these scholars we cross the principal continents from east to west and from prehistory to the present day, examining the rich history of the horse in art, which illustrates how dearly horses have been prized by all human societies fortunate enough to encounter them.

The artistic styles represented in this book offer something for every taste. There are cave paintings and sculptures, medieval illuminated manuscripts and photographs, and depictions of battle and scenes of leisure. Uccello, Rubens, Van Dyck, Velázquez, Géricault, Stubbs, David, and Picasso are among the  artists featured in this in-depth study. As the more than three hundred images in this precious volume diversely illustrate, the horse is as beautiful an animal as it has been useful—indeed, central—to the development of human society.

Printed in Singapore

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