ARTURO DI MODICA: Il Cavallo (1988)

  • Arturo Di Modica sculpting Il Cavallo

    Arturo Di Modica sculpting Il Cavallo 

    ©Arturo Di Modica

    Back to: HOME PAGE

     

    Arturo Di Modica lived with horses during his years in Florence and returned to the subject repeatedly throughout his career. In doing so, he aligned himself with a long European tradition, asserting that the horse — despite the rise of another Italian-dominated form of motion, the motorcar — had not lost its symbolic power.

     

    The lineage is deep. One could begin with the celebrated bronze horses of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice — actually copper and likely cast in third-century Greece — and trace a continuous presence through the Renaissance: the equestrian visions of Andrea Mantegna, the sculptural mastery of Andrea del Verrocchio, and Benozzo Gozzoli’s richly populated Procession of the Magi. The horse, pacing, racing, or rearing, has long been a vessel for ambition, authority, and momentum.

    Enquire

  • 'Di Modica wrapped it in a red blanket, loaded it single-handedly onto the back of his brand new Ferrari and drove off to install'

     

    - Anthony Haden-Guest

    One of the most famous equine sculptures in history, however, never truly existed. Gran Cavallo — the horse-that-never-was — was conceived by another Florentine, Leonardo da Vinci. Commissioned in 1482 by Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan, Leonardo was tasked with creating the largest equestrian statue the world had ever seen, in honour of the Duke’s father. Leonardo produced countless studies and drawings, but his project stalled at the stage of a monumental clay model. When French forces invaded Milan in 1499, the model was reportedly used for target practice.
    Read more
    Arturo Di Modica, by contrast, proved considerably more decisive in bronze. One of his earliest major equine works was a polished bronze horse installed in 1984 in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. The sculpture marked a pivotal moment in his development. Much of Di Modica’s earlier surviving work — he destroyed a significant quantity, dissatisfied — was rooted almost entirely in abstraction. With this horse, recognisable figurative elements began to assert themselves.
     
    They asserted themselves perhaps too strongly. Ivana Trump reportedly approached Di Modica to point out that the horse’s genitalia were rather prominent for visitors stepping out of the elevator. Di Modica, unfazed, said he had a solution. “Okay, I am coming tomorrow with underwear for him,” he said. The audacious horse, Di Modica later recounted, was “very quickly sold”.
     
    By this point, Di Modica had already demonstrated a sharp instinct for commanding attention. His covert nocturnal installation of eight marble sculptures along Fifth Avenue outside Rockefeller Center had shown his ability to harness the media as an extension of the artwork itself. This tactic has historical precedent: James McNeill Whistler and Oscar Wilde famously used publicity as an artistic weapon during the late nineteenth-century Aesthetic Movement.
     
    Their success was such that Gilbert & Sullivan transformed the phenomenon into the comic opera Patience, prompting producers to send Wilde — flamboyant, formidable, and media-savvy — on a lecture tour of America ahead of the New York opening. The trajectory from those aesthetes to modern figures such as Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Banksy is clear. Creative self-promotion has become inseparable from artistic impact, and Di Modica occupies a distinctive place in that lineage.
     
    His first intervention at Rockefeller Center had worked — emphatically. His second followed the same tactical logic but emerged from an entirely different emotional register. This time, the motivation was not confrontation, but affection.
    The result was Il Cavallo.
     
    Scaled up from a three-foot model into a powerful new bronze, Il Cavallo was unveiled on Valentine’s Day 1985, exactly one year after the Trump Tower horse. Di Modica wrapped the sculpture in a red blanket emblazoned with the words BE MY VALENTINE / N.Y LOVE AD, loaded it single-handedly onto the back of his brand-new Ferrari, and drove it to Lincoln Center. There, once again without permission, he installed the work and announced that it was “a Valentine’s gift to all the people in New York who are in love.”
     
    A three-foot version of Il Cavallo was later sold to Luciano Pavarotti. Di Modica was never shy of symbolism, and few creatures carry a denser accumulation of mythic meaning than the horse — from Alexander the Great’s Bucephalus to Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged steed, to the pale horse ridden by Death in the Book of Revelation. Only the bull, perhaps, rivals it.
  • 1988: Valentines Day, Lincoln Center

    1988: Valentines Day, Lincoln Center

    That parallel is instructive. The 1984 horse installed in Trump Tower lowers its head to within a foot of the ground, as if mid-gallop. The 1985 Il Cavallo at Lincoln Center presents a stark contrast: a massively muscled animal with its neck arched high, head thrown back, reaching toward the whip-like curve of its tail.
     
    At once naturalistic and electrically charged, the sculpture was immediately embraced by the public. Its success delivered a profound boost of confidence to the artist. Il Cavallo carried Di Modica forward at full stride — directly toward his next, and most consequential, creation: Charging Bull.

  • Charging Bull

    1989

  • Shanghai Bull

    2010