The da Vinci that isn't

Sunday, I went to the High Museum and was greeted by this.

This is the Sforza Horse, the monumental statue that Leonardo never completed.

In the late 1400s, da Vinci envisioned the world’s largest, most technically challenging statue, one that would depict Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, on horseback. For more than 15 years, he studied the anatomy of horses, sketched and drew the statute numerous times, developed detailed plans for the sculpture and techniques to cast the immense horse and rider in bronze. He created a huge clay model, but war with France intervened and bronze for the horse was requisitioned for cannons. Invading soldiers destroyed the great clay horse, the one da Vinci expected to be a defining work.

This horse is a 26-foot-high recreation of the Sforza horse, manufactured by the Opera Laboratori Fiorentini and loaned for the exhibit. In order to assemble it in the courtyard ouside the main entry, it was lifted - in pieces - over the building and reassembled.

This may be the largest ppiece of the exhibit - ironic, considering it was the work that Leonardo never finished - but it is hardly the most amazing.

The sketches and ink drawings by the dozens and the terra cotta pieces from Verrocchio's workshop and the baptistry panel with comparisons between the pieces and Leonardo's sketches and the scholarly conjecture about what parts Leonardo did as a student. Plus three immense bronze figures by his student, Giovan Francesco Rustici:

Freestanding and somewhat cleaned up, these figures are vastly more imposing than in the picture above in their "native" setting. Awesome. Seeing examples of Leonardo's mirror writing was fascinating - equally to see how incredibly legible his handwriting remains. There were bits and pieces of notes written left to right where I could clearly read the Italian or Latin words.

I hope to go back again. I do find the herds of people with their audio tours standing about slackmouthed who appear to be listening more than *looking* to be annoying. I watched one man stand in front of a display case, blocking others from viewing, who was staring intent at the audio tour device for 9/10ths of the time that he was hogging access to the display. Read and look, people. Then stand back and play the little speech. Or vice versa.

My other gripe is that Americans clearly have no idea how to queue. They crowd in from left, right and center and don't follow any sort of traffic pattern. Of course, places like the High and the Aquarium could do things to encourage a traffic pattern and they don't. A few ropes and arrows would go a long way to make up for the fact that people are too stupid and rude to queue out of courtesy.

The rest of the weekend was trying to help out a little at the K9 Daze at Wills Park - I fear I was not much help - errands and a bit of reading, knitting and movie watching. It started raining right around 8 p.m. Sunday - not a pounding sort of rain, but hard enough to soak you in a minute or two and that rain was still streaming down at 2 a.m. and only tapered off to spots and spits around dawn. The front that brought it, though, was apparently moving much more quickly than our earlier deluge and while the creeks were higher than normal this morning, nothing seemed to be over its banks. We certainly don't need any more flooding while people clean up from last month's mess.

AND, a certain driveway got concrete Friday and Saturday so life for my dear friends should become much nicer today or tomorrow when they can finally drive on it!