HClaireB

By HClaireB

Medici horse

Thinking about race horses and cart horses and the various objects around my garden, this is a modern copy of a fragment of a Greek statue of the 4th century BC.  It's made in reconstituted stone so doesn't need to be protected for the Winter.  It's called the Medici Riccardi horse head because the bronze original, which is now in the archeological museum in Florence, spent many centuries in the palace of that name.  The Medici, when they were nouveau riche, acquired it in the mid 15th century to burnish their antique credentials.  It has also lived in the Palazzo Vecchio (Florence's Town Hall), the Uffizi Gallery, and was taken to Naples for safe-keeping when Napoleon was ransacking Italy.  My copy lives in what we call the Paddock, which is appropriate, as that was where previous owners kept horses.

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