Chapter 15　Among the Best

Have you ever seen a statue of a famous man sitting in a car?No?I haven't, either. And yet in the days when men used horses to carry them from place to place, many statues of great men were made showing them on horseback.

The reason there are no statues of men in automobiles is that a large man-made object like a car is not a suitable subject for sculpture. Very few man-made objects are.A sculptor tries to copy nature.His subjects are things that grow-men, animals, plants, and flowers.A good mechanic with a hammer and chisel could carve an automobile in marble, but it takes an artist to model a horse.

Do you remember the horses and their riders made by Phidias on the Parthenon frieze?They are reliefs. It is much easier to make a horse in relief than in-the-round because in the relief the horse is part of the background and does not have to support all its weight on its legs.A statue of a man on horseback is called an equestrian statue.The Romans made better equestrian statues than the Greeks because they knew more about supporting weights.But after the time of the ancient Romans, no good equestrian statue was made for a thousand years.

The man who made the first good equestrian statue after all those years was Donatello. It was bigger than life-size and was made of bronze.It took Donatello ten years to make it and set it up in Padua, Italy.It is such a fine statue that many people call it the second best