Soldier on Horseback

Author: Klazina Botke

This mounted soldier is laid out with emphatic contours. A few shadows are indicated with the brush to give man and horse more volume. The soldier is resting his left hand gently on the horse’s neck, which is arched to show that it is firmly under control. It does not seem to have any ears, though, which may have been lost through damage to the parchment or were never drawn. The parchment might indicate that the sheet came from a manuscript. Another possibility is that the scene is from a book of drawings and was part of a repertory of motifs made for study and reuse.

The drawing was acquired by Koenigs as Italian from around 1400, but Degenhart and Schmitt did not include it in their Corpus der Italienischen Zeichnungen 1300-1450. Perhaps they did not know it, or regarded it as not Italian or of a later date.^[1] Van Schendel (1938), the only author to have published the sheet, placed it in Lombardy at the end of the fourteenth century after analyzing the draughtsmanship and the figure’s clothing.^[2] He associated the specific and ‘decorative’ way in which the contours of the horse were executed with Altichiero da Zavio’s (c.1330-c.1390) pen drawing in a manuscript of Petrarch’s De viris illustribus in Paris.^[3] That, though, is far livelier than our drawing. His comparison with the mounted horsemen in a manuscript in Chantilly about the siege of Troy is also not convincing.^[4] It is clear, however, that this is an early modern interpretation of a Roman soldier on horseback.

The yoke at the top of the breastplate and the fringed shoulder plates identify the rider as a man from Roman antiquity. The saddle and horse’s bit are obviously Italian, and the depiction of the man’s attire suggest the drawing was made around the beginning of the fifteenth century, as do the length of the armour and the shape of the chest protector.^[5] A similar costume can be seen in a drawing of St George in a wonderful illuminated manuscript of 1485-90 in London.^[6] It is, however, difficult to track down the origin of our work, which could have been made by a miniaturist or a painter.