Equestrian
Riders on horseback, from imperial bronzes and court portraits to modern works that unseat the heroic type.
8 works · 10 related artists
About
An equestrian image puts a rider on horseback, and for centuries that meant power: a ruler above the crowd, mastering a strong animal as he masters a state. Renaissance Italy cast its commanders in bronze, as in Andrea del Verrocchio's Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice (completed 1496), taking as a model the ancient gilded Marcus Aurelius in Rome, which had survived because it was thought to show Constantine.
Court painters made the format grand. Titian's Charles V at Mühlberg (1548) sets the emperor in armour against a stormy dusk, and Anthony van Dyck's Charles I on Horseback (c. 1637–38) makes a short king commanding. Modern artists have undone the heroism: Marino Marini's horses and riders of the 1940s and 1950s rear in alarm, and Kehinde Wiley's Rumors of War (2019) seats a young Black man in streetwear on a monumental bronze horse.
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