“[Botero] has the greatest reverence for horses, as we have seen ... Botero’s use of the horse is something akin to Cervantes’ use of the nag Rocinante in Don Quixote."
Fernando Botero’s Horse of 1992 stands as a remarkable contribution to the tradition of monumental sculpture and the equine motif. With its exaggerated geometric proportions and mesmerizing voluminous form, the present work exemplifies Botero’s distinct contribution to sculpture, particularly monumental forms, since his foray into the medium in 1972. Throughout the history of human creativity, few symbols are more iconic and ubiquitous than the horse. Across civilizations, the motif has appeared and reappeared, proving itself to be an enduring, arguably even universal, emblem of strength and majesty. In Horse, Botero brings his singular visual lexicon and his unparalleled skill in fusing playful stylization with historical reverence, to bring to life a monument that is equal parts playful and profound.
The artist’s lengthy and dedicated study of the Western art historical canon underscores how the equine motif, so elegantly interrogated in the present work, would have been present throughout the artist’s career. Informed by art historical influences ranging from Italian Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age Masters to the French Impressionists and even his New York School contemporaries, Fernando Botero achieved a uniquely personal solution to bring figuration into the twentieth century: one that embraces both pointed societal critique and a sly sense of humor. Born to humble beginnings in the countryside near MedellĂn, Colombia in 1932, Botero’s ambition (and a scholarship) took him to the prestigious Academia San Fernando in Madrid in 1952. Once there, he funded years of study and travel to Europe’s great museums by selling copies of Velázquez, Goya and Rubens' masterpieces to tourists, executed over painstaking hours of observation in the Prado — where equestrian portraits of Europe's royal families litter the storied halls. These formative images of power and conquest would inform the reappearance of the animal throughout Botero's later oeuvre.
Botero’s interrogation of the horse motif finds its roots not only in the art historical canon but also in his rural Colombian childhood. The artist’s father, David Botero, was a traveling salesman who rode on horseback for work and passed away when Botero was just four years old. Decades later, following the tragic death of Botero's four-year-old son Pedro in a car accident, he began a mournful series of portraits and sculptures of Pedro on horseback, echoing the significance of the animal in his relationship with his own father. These works were among the artist's first forays into sculpture — and retained a profound personal resonance within his wider body of work. Often echoing the conventions of Western equestrian portraits of royal families, or of Colombian depictions of Simón Bolivar, Botero's horses retain a characteristic warmth.
Monumental Works by Fernando Botero Installed Around the World
Horse, in its extraordinary physicality and satirical sensibility, at once pays homage to many of these art historical influences while remaining true to his characteristic style. The present work’s magnificent build and elongated legs evoke the sturdy, geometric representations of the horse finely crafted in Ancient Greece, while its monumentality immediately draws comparisons to Leonardo da Vinci’s Gran Cavallo which now stands over 24 feet tall at the Hippodrome de San Siro in Milan. Through its sheer bronze mass, the present work conveys a sense of strength and power while also presenting a quiet, almost stoic, dignity through its aloof gaze and still stance, akin to the posed elegance of the Celestial Horses of the Chinese Han Dynasty, which were interred with emperors to serve as spiritual companions in the afterlife.
- 17,000 BCE
- 440 BCE
- 10 BCE
- 200
- 1077
- 1482
- 1640
- 1762
- 1803
- 1827
- 1878
- 1911
- 2019
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17,000 BCEMagdalenian peoples, Wall Painting from the Lascaux Caves, c. 22,000 - 17,000 BCE
Montignac, France -
440 BCEAncient Greece, Cavalry from the Parthenon Frieze, c. 443 - 437 BCE
British Museum, London -
10 BCEAssyrian peoples, Lamassu from the Palace of Sargon, Khorsabad, 10-6 BCE
Musée du Louvre, Paris -
200Eastern Han China, Flying Horse of Gansu, 200 CE
Gansu Provincial Museum, Lanzhou -
1077Anglo-Saxon embroiderers, A Scene from the Bayeux Tapestry depicting Bishop Odo and Duke William’s army during the Battle of Hastings in 1066, c. 1077
Bayeux Museum -
1482Conceived by Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo’s Horse, designed c. 1490, cast 1999
Hippodrome of San Siro, Milan -
1640Peter Paul Rubens, Philip II on Horseback, c. 1630-40
Museo del Prado, Madrid -
1762George Stubbs, Whistlejacket, c. 1762
National Gallery, London -
1803Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 1801-05
Château de Malmaison, Rueil-Malmaison -
1827Eugène Delacroix, Horse Frightened by Lightning, 1825-29
Museum of Replica Handbags s, Budapest -
1878Eadweard Muybridge, The Horse in Motion, 1878
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. -
1911Franz Marc, Blue Horses, 1911
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis -
2019Charles Ray, Two Horses, 2019
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
However, despite its physicality and scale, the exaggerated proportions and softened forms—most prominent in the horse’s thick, curvaceous legs, oversized muscles, and barrel-like torso—challenge the viewer’s perception of reality. Botero lived in New York from the late 1950s-70s, and a kindred instinct can be seen between the Colombian artist and a nascent American movement that emerged during those years — Pop Art. Artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Alex Katz processed the relentless consumerism of midcentury America with a certain sarcasm, applying the gleaming, plastic aesthetic of advertising to everyday subjects. Likewise Botero applies a certain irony in his processing of celebrated works of the Western canon, with a kindred impulse to reveal (and revel in) the artifice of these works. Later, he reflected - “without knowing it it was a little like the philosophy of Pop Art. Another thing I found was important was that - with a bold approach - the head is so overblown that it takes up the entire space. I’m not saying that I created this in American art but I wasn’t taking it from American artists.” (Fernando Botero, quoted in Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Fernando Botero, 1979, p. 15)
Botero is perhaps most celebrated for this exploration of volume and dimensions in a way that adds an element of whimsy to his work. The artists signature style, often dubbed “Boterismo,” shed light on the artist’s interest in capturing the sensual language of painting and sculpture, particularly in the aesthetics that arise in the expansion of mass and form. Botero almost demonstrates his mastery of bronze in the smooth polished surface gleaming with a dark, velvety patina, and along with it a refined elegance. The resulting sculpture is a work that is indubitably part of a broader conversation about power and monumentality without losing its engaging playfulness, boasting an inviting and approachable grandeur to the motif of the horse.
