Description
This graceful, elegant creature is a small-scale copy of one of the four life-size walking horses on the facade of the Basilica of St. Mark in Venice. In the Renaissance, they were thought to have been cast by the great Greek sculptor Lysippus, and, therefore, reduced copies were in great demand. The life-size horses were originally from a "quadriga" (four-horse chariot) of a type installed atop a triumphal arch in ancient Rome. In the 4th century, Emperor Constantine took the horses to his new capital Constantinople (present-day Istanbul, Turkey). In the 1200s, they were stolen by Crusaders, who brought them to Venice.
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