Museum hosts daVinci exhibit

By DORIE TURNER
Associated Press Writer
ATLANTA (AP) — Leonardo da Vinci once spent nearly two decades creating a 26-foot sculpture of a horse to honor a royal Italian family, only to have the plaster masterpiece destroyed by French soldiers.
The Italian artist best known for his paintings and inventions rather than sculpting abilities created more than a dozen sculptures in his lifetime, many of which have disappeared.
A rare U.S. exhibit of the remaining few sculptures and dozens of sketches by da Vinci and his contemporaries will open Tuesday at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, featuring art never seen outside of Europe.
The exhibit will remain in Atlanta until February, when a modified version will travel to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It includes pieces from the Vatican’s art collection, the Louvre in Paris and the royal collection at Windsor Castle in England.
The centerpiece is a nearly 30-foot recreation of da Vinci’s destroyed horse statue, which towers over the plaza outside the High. Inside the museum are the meticulous drawings and anatomical notes he made of the Sforza family’s horses in hopes of perfectly capturing the animals’ motion.
He even mapped out the machines he needed to invent to cover the giant plaster horse in bronze and how to transport it once it was completed. Those plans never came to fruition, though, because the bronze intended for the statue was used to make cannons for a war with France. When the French army invaded Milan, the plaster horse was destroyed by soldiers.
The exhibit also includes three pieces believed to have been sculpted in part by da Vinci, though his name was never put on any of them, said exhibit curator Gary Radke, a Syracuse University humanities professor. Those are a silver sculptured panel depicting the beheading of John the Baptist, a small bronze horse and a terra-cotta angel relief.
On the Net:
High Museum: http://www.high.org
Published in The Messenger 10.2.09

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