Twenty Pounds of Horse Power

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Announcer: This is a Getty podcast.

[Theme music begins]

Host: Whoa there, cowpoke, and gather around the campfire for this wild horse tale. Welcome to If Objects Could Talk, the podcast where art and artifacts come alive to tell their side of the story.

Can you strike a pose for me? Now, how long can you hold it? 10 seconds? 20? What about a year? Well, today’s guest probably has you beat. He’s a bronze horse that has been frozen in a single dramatic pose for over 400 years. That is a long time to stay still. This rearing horse was created by Dutch sculptor Adriaen de Vries sometime between 1605 and 1610. This horse has seen a lot of places since then. These days, he calls the Getty Center Museum home. But no matter where he is, he always keeps his cool. [guitar strum]

Horse: [Old Western drawl] Well, here we are. Let’s get this started so we can finish it. [guitar strum] Name’s not important. Never needed one. You take one look at me and you already know everything you need to know. 20 pounds of bronze, rearing back on my hind legs, front hooves off the ground, neck curved like a question mark. [horse whinney] 19 inches high, about the size of a bowling pin, or the biggest cowboy hat you ever saw.

[Old West music]

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “That horse seems like a handful,” and you would not be wrong. I’ve been to a lot of places. Castles in Europe, private collections, cold, dark storage rooms where no one could appreciate me properly. And now, Southern California, the Getty, perched up on a hilltop above Los Angeles with a view you would not believe. The Pacific on a clear day, the mountains, the whole spread. [seagulls squawk over ocean water] I’ll be honest with you, this suits me.

I am bronze, dark, reddish brown, a little warm looking in the right light, and boy am I shiny.

[Quick classical music]

My sculptor was Adriaen de Vries, Dutch, very talented. His work was so prized [voices say “ooh!”] that centuries later, invading armies [soldiers cheer] actually stole his sculptures as war trophies. Today, his bronzes sit in major museums around the world, and he’s remembered as one of the most important sculptors of his era. [museum gallery chatter] He was famous for making bronze do things other sculptors couldn’t. [grunting voices] Capturing muscles straining, bodies twisting, and motion frozen mid-action, all in solid metal. [metal clangs]

[horse whistles] It gave me muscles you can actually see! Muscles that are hard at work. My haunches are coiled. [spring launches] My neck curves just so. [slide whistle] My mane looks like it caught a breeze [birds chirp over wind] and decided to stay there. And my face, nostrils wide open, [animal growls] eyes too. [quick blinks] The kinda look that says, “I see everything and I’m ready for anything.” [horse whinny]

I have no rider, no bridle, no saddle, no one telling me where to go or what to do. It’s just me making a choice because I do what I want. By every rule of physics, I should not be standing, and yet here I am.

[Triumphant classical music]

A massive bronze sculpture. We’re talking seriously heavy. Balance on just two back legs and a tail. 400 years later, still standing, still rearing, not falling over. Think about that for a second. [triumphant music]

That’s not luck. That’s not an accident. To pull something like that off, you need two things: real expertise and a very, very good plan.

[Jaunty harpsichord music]

For De Vries, a good plan started with wax. I was built in wax first. Every muscle, every hair, every hoof sculpted by hand. Then he made a mold from it, and pressed a thin layer of wax into that mold, so we ended up with a hollow wax horse. That might sound strange. A wax horse would melt in an instant, and that’s exactly the point. [child says “huh?”] He filled part of the inside of the hollow wax horse with a special heat-proof paste called a core, which could be removed in whole or in part after casting was done. [wet sloshing] The horse got completely covered in more of the paste, covering every inch of the wax. Once that paste hardened, it was time for the big trick. The whole thing got flipped upside down and heated up until the wax melted [burning kiln] and drained away completely. The wax horse vanished, [voice echos] but it left behind a horse-shaped empty space inside the hardened shell. That’s the lost wax part. The wax is gone, or lost, forever. Then molten bronze, metal so hot it’s liquid, [bubbling] got poured into that empty space, filling every little groove where the wax used to be, right down to the curls in my mane. Once the bronze cooled and hardened, [steam] I was made the exact shape of that wax model, now bronze, with a custom color to look like a chestnut stallion. [horse whinny]

Majestic. [horse grunts]

Now, I need you to understand something, something important, about horses. Almost every great civilization you’ve ever heard of, nearly every kingdom, horses were there. We didn’t just carry armies. [marching] We carried merchants, priests, explorers, a messenger that had to arrive with a warning before morning, [battle music and hose whinny] a family moving everything they own to somewhere they’d never been.

You didn’t go far without a horse or two. We pulled plows, too. Don’t let anyone tell you the history of agriculture leaves us out. And somewhere along the way, humans figured out that riding a horse wasn’t just for work, it was something worth doing well, worth doing beautifully. That’s dressage, the art of horse and rider moving as one thing. It became a sport, a discipline, a tradition. Still is.

[Violin music interlude]

It wasn’t just about speed or strength, though I’ll note we have considerable amounts of both. Humans and horses have an understanding that goes back thousands of years. [horse whinny] We can sense what you’re feeling. [whinnies again] A good horse knows when its rider is afraid, [voice yells] knows when they’re confident, [voice chuckles] knows when they’re not sure which way to go. Best to go with confident.

[Dramatic classical music]

If you wanted to show the world that you were powerful, you put yourself on a horse. Rulers on horseback. Because a man on foot is just a man. [drum roll] A man on a horse is elevated, literally. [triumphant music]

Statues of rulers on horseback go all the way back to ancient Rome.

[Lute music]

There’s one of the emperor, Marcus Aurelius, that’s been standing in Rome for nearly 2,000 years. Kings commissioned paintings of themselves on their finest horses because of the message. It said, “This person commands power. This person commands the most magnificent animal alive. [horse whinny] Don’t mess with him. He’s got horses in his stables, gold in the bank, and an army at the ready.”

So when De Vries chose to sculpt me alone with no rider, that was another statement. The horse doesn’t need the king. [voice yells “hey!”] The power is in the horse itself, [horse snorts] because I am just too cool. [rock guitar riff]

Which is why the pose I’m in is so interesting. This pose, rearing up on two legs, isn’t a horse’s whole life, not even close. A horse could spend most of its life doing other things. Running, obviously. Standing in fields, resting, eating, thinking, taking it all in. [nature sounds] And De Vries looked at all of that, the whole of a horse’s life, and he chose this, this moment, the explosion of motion right before whatever comes next.

[Guitar strumming]

I hope that’s the message you get when you look at me. [laughs] You’ll have to look at a picture, of course. Not currently on view. I’m a loner. Need time to myself to think about the vastness of it all.

[crowd chatter] But when I am in the gallery, I get a lot of attention from the cool kids, cowboys [child says “yee-haw”] and horse girls. [child says “yippee”] As a matter of fact, let me tell you about a kid I met not too long ago. Girl [child says “woo-hoo!”] maybe nine years old, came in with her class, big group. [loud child chatter] Everyone moving fast, backpacks secured, carried on the front so no one knocks over a statue like me, sneakers squeaking on the floors.

But this kid stopped.

She was at the back of the group, and I don’t think her teacher even noticed she’d fallen behind. She just stood there looking at me, actually trying to figure something out. After a while, she said, “What happened right before that?” And I thought, “Oh, this one gets it.” [Western guitar riff]

Maybe I got scared by a bee. [bee buzz and horse whinny] Maybe I was about to step in a cow patty. [squelch and horse grunt] Maybe I was startled by the wind. [wind blows and horse whicker] The truth? I’ll never tell.

[Old West music]

Here’s what I want you to think about, and you can take your time with it. If someone made a sculpture of you right now, or last year, or whenever, what moment would they capture? Not the whole you, just one moment. Would it be the moment you scored the goal? [crowd cheers] Or the moment right before you scored it, when you were setting up and everything was clicking into place? [voice takes a breath] Would it be the time you laughed so hard at lunch that something came out of your nose? [snort and child laughs] The time you stood up for somebody and it cost you something. The quiet moment, reading on the couch with your shoes off. [page turns]

And here’s the harder question: would that one moment tell the whole story of who you are? De Vries picked my moment. It’s a majestic moment, but it’s not the whole story, and that’s just fine with me. I like being a mystery.

[Theme music plays]

Host: I hope you enjoyed learning about horses and lost-wax casting. Join us next time when a proper lady lights up the studio. [angelic chorus] To see photographs of the horse, visit our website at Getty dot edu slash IOCT. We’ve also got a listening guide with discussion questions and related activities there.

Did you recognize our horse’s voice? It was Mr. Eric from What If World. To hear more from him, you can listen to What If World stories every week wherever you listen to podcasts, or by going to What If World dot fun.

This episode was written by Tocarra Elise and produced by Zoe Goldman. Theme music, mixing, and sound design by Alexandra Kalinowski. Christopher Sprinkle is executive producer. Special thanks to curators Anne-Lise Desmas and Miriam Schefzyk, as well as Rebekkah Hart and conservator Jane Bassett.

These stories are historical fiction. They’re based on historical facts and deep research, but we’ve filled in the gaps to make a good story. If you have questions about what you’ve heard, write to us at podteam at Getty dot edu. Catch you next time.