Cup in the Form of a Horse and Rider
Hans Ludwig Kienle (Ulm (now Germany))
1630
- Medium
- Silver and gilded silver
- Classification
- Metalwork
- Dimensions
- H.: 31.5 cm (12 3/8 in.); 30.5 × 28.9 × 14.3 cm (12 × 11 3/8 × 5 5/8 in.)
- Culture
- Ulm
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Applied Arts of Europe
- Credit line
- Eloise W. Martin fund; through prior acquisition of the George F. Harding Collection; Henry Horner Strauss, Pauline S. Armstrong, Harry and Maribel G. Blum, Tillie C. Cohn, Richard T. Crane, Jr. Memorial, Stanford Marks, Michael A.…
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Adult profiles and older: its museum's description or title mentions nudity. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
This extraordinary sculptural group, which consists of a male nude astride a rearing horse, is a rare example of the work of Hans Ludwig Kienle, a German silversmith who specialized in depicting animals. Conceived as a drinking cup, this work was destined for display on a buffet or sideboard. Kienle’s work belongs to a larger body of German Renaissance and Baroque sideboard silver that includes cups in the form of three-dimensional horses, lions, stags, and other animals. Horse-and-rider figural groups have their roots in earlier Greek and Roman sculpture. Renaissance princes often had themselves depicted in monumental form, wearing Classical dress or contemporary armor and sitting atop prancing or rearing steeds. That Kienle based this silver cup on an earlier sculptural model is suggested by the existence of a bronze group of virtually identical subject, composition, and scale, made in northern Italy during the second half of the sixteenth century. Kienle masterfully rendered the differentiation of human and equine musculature through the contrast of silver and silver-gilt surfaces, thus animating the already dynamic subject.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
