Food for the Soul – da Vinci’s Horse

Leonardo da Vinci. Ca.1491. Study for the Sforza monument. Image source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain

By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout

It was a classic moment of serendipity. Catherine, Robert and I have been filming stories about da Vinci in Milan when we met at a book fair an Italian author, Marco Malvaldi, who has just written a book about da Vinci’s bronze horse statue. In early 1490’s Da Vinci worked on this immense statue of a horse and a rider as a monument to his patron Lodovico Sforza. The statue has never been cast because Sforza used the bronze to produce cannons for his defense of Milan.

In his new book “The Measure of a Man” Malvaldi reveals some engineering innovations and discoveries that da Vinci made while working out how to cast such a huge bronze. At the close of 2019, a year in which we declared Da Vinci “Solari’s Hero of the Year,” we are offering you in this interview one more insight into the old master’s unique mind.