Equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni Site Features

Colleoni sits rigid and alert in the saddle, gathering the reins as if about to spur his horse into a charge -- a marked contrast to the calmer poise of Donatello's Gattamelata, which directly inspired it. The horse's raised foreleg and turned head, and the rider's braced stance in the stirrups, give the whole group a tension that set a new standard for equestrian sculpture in Renaissance Italy.

Colleoni himself is rendered in the armor of a Renaissance captain, his face set and severe. The bronze's surface still shows the sharp, realistic musculature of the horse that contemporaries praised as a technical achievement in its own right.

The monument stands in Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo, in Castello, and its placement is the most quietly political thing about it. Colleoni's will asked for a statue "in front of San Marco". The Republic took the money and read the phrase against the Scuola Grande di San Marco instead -- so the horse faces the Scuola's marble facade, not the basilica he had in mind.

Alessandro Leopardi's pedestal does much of the work. It lifts the group well above head height on a tall plinth with paired columns, so the statue reads against open sky rather than against the brick of the basilica behind it, and forces the long upward view that makes the horse's raised foreleg legible from across the campo.

The campo is one of the largest open spaces in Venice and one of the few designed to be seen across. Coming from the Fondamente Nove the statue appears in three-quarter view with the Gothic basilica behind it; from the bridge on the southern side it is seen head-on, which is the angle most reproductions use.