Leonardo da Vinci's Sforza Monument Horse: The Art and the Engineering.

This volume contains the papers delivered at a symposium held on 1819 April 1991, as well as a foreword by Stephen H. Cutliffe and a very nice introduction by Diane Cole Ahl, who also is the book's editor. The symposium was inspired by the project of Charles Dent, a retired airline pilot, to create a full-scale bronze reconstruction of the great horse that Leonardo never made. On the whole the book is well-produced, although I would have preferred it if the plates had been put in back and the illustrations numbered, as well as referred to by number in the text.

The nine papers, all worth reading, vary considerably in length. Two of them, Dario Covi's "The Italian Renaissance and the Equestrian Monument," and Ellen Wells's "Partners in Power: The Horses of Leonardo's Italy (1450-1550)," are simple introductions to their respective subjects, with little on the Sforza project as such. Two others, Hidemichi Tanaka's "The Process of the Nagoya City Sforza Reconstruction," and Richard Polich's "Engineering and Casting an Eighty-Ton Horse to Stand on Two Legs," are relatively brief descriptions of the two recent or current attempts to reconstruct the great horse.

The other five papers are more ambitious. In his "The Sforza Horse in Context," Carlo Pedretti proposes, on the basis of evidence which he himself admits to be thin, both that the horse was to have had its head reined in and that the statue was to have been mounted on a ravelin in front of the main gate of the Castello Sforzesco. Virginia Bush's "The Political Contexts of the Sforza Horse" is perceptive and challenging, although I find her reconstructions of two colossal monuments by Leonardo both in the courtyard of the Castello Sforzesco and in front of the main door of Palazzo Vecchio in Florence rather silly. Martin Kemp's "Leonardo's Drawings . . . The Program of Research" is a good general survey, although I did not find Kemp convincing on a number of points. For me the most impressive contribution is Chandler Kirwin's "The Bubble Reputation: In the Cannon's and the Horse's Mouth." Kirwin proposes that Leonardo intended to cast the great horse not by means of the lost-wax process but in the way in which cannon were cast, and also that the total height of the horse may have been not 7.3 but 9.65 m. His careful analysis is, however, based on a number of "ifs" and leads to some evident contradictions, making it clear that we simply do not have enough reliable information on the Sforza project to know certain things about it. Jack Wasserman's "Traditional Sculpture and the Place of Contemporary Replication" is often delightful and provocative. Wasserman, however, surely should have distinguished more carefully between simple replicas such as the Marcus Aurelius (now in Providence) and highly dubious reconstructions such as the Athena Parthenos (now in Nashville), or the two Sforza horse projects.

The strength of this book is that it gives us a number of valuable viewpoints on the Sforza Monument. The other side of the coin is that these viewpoints often are greatly at variance with one another. For example, it is not at all clear from what we read whether or not Leonardo's conception owed much to Verrocchio's Colleoni Monument. That surely ought not to be an insoluble question. And if the monument was to have been made as Kirwin believes it was, it would have been a disaster - as Polich puts it, "one of the biggest ingots in the world, vaguely resembling a horse." In short we still have, in spite of the nine contributions in this volume, a great deal to learn about the Sforza Monument.

RAB HATFIELD Syracuse University in Italy