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hoofs.
Leonardo may have been in the competition there and then, but the
means for executing the monument do not seem to have been at once
forthcoming. It was not perhaps until some years later that Leonardo
in a letter to the Duke (No. 719) reminded him of the project for
the monument. Then, after he had obeyed a summons to Milan, the plan
seems to have been so far modified, perhaps in consequence of a
remonstrance on the part of the artist, that a pacing horse was
substituted for one galloping, and it may have been at the same time
that the colossal dimensions of the statue were first decided on.
The designs given on Pl. LXX, LXXI, LXXII, 2 and 3, LXXIII and LXXIV
and on pp. 4 and 24, as well as three sketches on Pl. LXIX may be
studied with reference to the project in its new form, though it is
hardly possible to believe that in either of these we see the design
as it was actually carried out. It is probable that in Milan
Leonardo worked less on drawings, than in making small models of wax
and clay as preparatory to his larger model. Among the drawings
enumerated above, one in black chalk, Pl. LXXIII--the upper sketch
on the right hand side, reminds us strongly of the antique statue of
Marcus Aurelius. If, as it would seem, Leonardo had not until then
visited Rome, he might easily have known this statue from drawings
by his former master and friend Verrocchio, for Verrocchio had been
in Rome for a long time between 1470 and 1480. In 1473 Pope Sixtus
IV had this antique equestrian statue restored and placed on a new
pedestal in front of the church of San Giovanni in Luterano.
521
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