Italian Renaissance Sculptures

Have you ever been thinking about the reason why the sculptures of horses made during Italian Renaissance have a cannonball under their hoof? Many of you probably say to yourself "It looks good." However, the reason is not aesthetic. It's physical reason!

Statues were made of bronze, so that not very solid material. As a result the stability of statues, in this case horses, wasn't very good. And the trick with cannonball was a great solution of such a problem.

Anyway, later you couldn't find any bronze horse with its hoof on cannonball. It's not because the artist didn't like them anymore. In fact they had learned something wonderful! They didn't need the help from cannonball anymore, because they started to use iron constructions inside their new sculptures as iron is really solid material so also the stability of sculpture is bigger.

You know, maybe we are sometimes trying to find much more profundity in the piece of art than there really is...