The Small Horse by Albrecht Dürer, engraving on paper, 1505, Nuremberg.

Engraving on paper by Albrecht Dürer, Nuremberg, 1505. Depiction of a horse shown standing in profile facing to the left, with his right front leg raised. He is led by a knight wearing an ornate helmet in the shape of a butterfly and winged buskins, and carrying a pike, walking behind him, partly hidden by the horse's body. They are positioned symmetrically within a round arched architectural setting shown in steep receding perspective. On the masonry wall in the centre is a bowl-shaped brazier giving off flames and smoke, with the date 1505 inscribed above and the artist's monogram inscribed on a block of masonry at the bottom middle of the image below the horse's body.

This image and another also dating from 1505, 'The Large Horse', were designed by Dürer as companion prints to show two contrasting postures of the horse, and associated allegorical meanings. This impression was acquired by the Museum as part of the Salting Bequest.

Historical significance: 'Panofsky suggests that the representation may refer to animal sensuality – typified by the horse – restrained by the higher powers of the intellect, in which case the flames emanating from the bowl would symbolize illuminating reason. The horse seems to have reached a dead end in the form of a stone wall and, in fact, if the structure signifies intellect, it has a prison-like quality. The animal’s tail has been restrained by a knot, yet it is unbridled, while the wingfooted warrior with his butterfly-winged helmet has been trying to keep pace with it, paralleling its stride. His open mouth suggests that he is somewhat out of breath from the attempt. The proposals that he should be identified as Perseus or Mercury have not found acceptance for lack of sufficient evidence.'

(FromThe Illustrated Bartsch 10 (Commentary): Sixteenth Century German Artists, Albrecht Dürer. edited by Walter L. Strauss, New York: Abaris Books, 1980, page 212)

In general, Dürer’s horses symbolize restraint. Roughly contemporary with the engraved Adam and Eve…of 1504, they are natural analogues to Adam. In them art and knowledge control the body and restore man’s status as the measure of things. In his Enchiridion Erasmus wrote that 'some have a rebellious body, an unbroken and refractory horse, so to speak; and the result is that even with the harshest bit, spurs, and club, the seating driver has trouble taming its wildness'...

Dürer expresses the idea of mastery less through emblem than through the very fabric of the image. In the Small Horse the muzzle and tail of a perfectly proportioned animal maintain an equal distance from the edge of the sheet, affirming that the power to frame – the force, that is, of aesthetic construction through rule – contains and controls the body and desire.

(From 'Albrecht Dürer: A Sixteenth-Century Influenza' by Joseph Koerner, in Bartrum, Guilia, ed. Albrecht Dürer and his Legacy – The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist, London: The British Museum Press, 2002, page 33)

'The horse is proportionately constructed on a grid of nine squares. Its features, as well as the fantastic helmet of the knight who leads it, are Leonardesque, perhaps transmitted by Galleazzo da San Severino in whose stable at Milan Leonardo had made studies. Galleazzo, after the fall of the Sforzas, spent many weeks at [Dürer's close friend and patron Willibald] Pirckheimer’s house in Nuremberg during 1502. The horse is also akin to the one in Dürer’s drawing in Venice.'
(From The Illustrated Bartsch 10 (Commentary): Sixteenth Century German Artists, Albrecht Dürer, edited by Walter L. Strauss, New York: Abaris Books, 1980, p.212)

The horse appears as a subject in a number of Dürer’s engravings, often as a focus for depicting movement and proportion, or in a moral or spiritual sense as an emblem of man’s control over himself and the world. In The Small Horse, it has been suggested that the horse is a symbol of sensuality. It seems as though the lively, unbridled animal would like to escape, but is restrained by his groom. The horse is also at the centre of a tightly controlled composition: shown in profile in a heraldic style, its sense of energy and motion is arrested by the strong force created by the intersecting diagonals of the architectural setting and the pike. Dürer uses a Classical idiom of balance and idealisation influenced by Italian Renaissance art and antique sculpture, for example the bronze horses in the Piazza San Marco in Venice, absorbed during his visits to Italy. This is even more apparent when the image is compared with its companion print from the same year, The Large Horse, which is a more naturalistic depiction of a much more docile, muscular animal in a foreshortened pose, standing patiently with its groom.

E.4623-1910