Horse Sense

Dominic Green explores the fi ne equine imagery on Ancient Greek vases and coins in a wide-ranging exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Horses, which were first domesticated on the Eurasian steppe some 4000 to 6000 years ago, were our constant companions until the triumph of the internal combustion engine in the mid-20th century. Man’s real four-legged friend disappeared from daily life gradually; in warfare, they were still essential to the German Blitzkrieg of Russia as late as 1941.

Today, however, horses are in what the German writer Ulrich Raulff calls ‘semi-retirement’, with a ‘part-time job as a recreational item, a mode of therapy, a status symbol, and source of pastoral support for female puberty’.

It is horse sense, Raulff argues in Farewell to the Horse (2017), to define modernity’s breach with the human past by our sudden divorce from our equine companions. The last public act of Nietzsche, who had trained as a cavalryman but injured himself attempting an unorthodox dismount, was to throw himself sobbing around the neck of a flogged horse.

In the decades after the philosopher of the modern crisis was carried off to the asylum, horses were slowly put out to pasture. Yet we remain, Raulff believes, haunted by the horse. We measure the strength of jet-engines in  ‘horsepower’. When we feel in ‘fine fettle’ we may ‘champ at the bit’. We know better than to look ‘a gift horse in the mouth’, but we rely on testimony that comes straight from it. The horse, practical and mythical, remains with us ‘like the shadow of a dream’ – or the ghostly images in Rembrandt’s Polish Rider and Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse.

The Horse in Ancient Greek Art, now on show at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond, USA, is a rich and complex exploration of equine themes in Ancient Greek art – a rather appropriate venue as Virginia is definitely ‘horse country’.