preparing for the festivities

In 1471, around the time the copper ball was placed atop the Duomo, Verrochio & Co. was involved, as were most of the other artisans of Florence, in the festivities organized by Lorenzo de’ Medici for the visit of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, the cruel and authoritarian (and soon-to-be assassinated) Duke of Milan….Verrochio’s shop had two major tasks for the festivities: redecorating the Medici’s guest quarters for the visitors and crafting a suit of armor and an ornate helmet as a gift.

The Duke of Milan’s cavalcade was dazzling even to the Florentines who were used to Medicean public spectacles. It included two thousand horses, six hundred soldiers, a thousand hunting hounds, falcons, falconers, trumpeters, pipers, barbers, dog trainers, musicians, and poets. It’s hard not to admire an entourage that travels with its own barbers and poets.

Walter Isaacson’s biography Leonardo da Vinci (Simon & Schuster, 2017)

requisite equine

I put horses in poems, but I’ve never ridden one. They just seem like a good thing to put into literature.

—Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments (Graywolf Press, 2017)

vision shifted

“White writing” appeared in my art the way flowers explode over the earth at a given time. With this method I found I could paint the frenetic rhythms of the modern city, something I couldn’t even approach with Renaissance techniques. In other words, through calligraphic line I was able to catch the restless pulse of our cities today. I began working this way in England—in Devonshire in 1935—when I returned from the Orient, where I’d studied Chinese brushwork. So in gentle Devonshire during the night, when I could hear the horses breathing in the field, I painted Broadway and Welcome Hero. In the process I probably experienced the most revolutionary sensations I have ever had in art, because while one part of me was creating these two works, another part was trying to hold me back. The old and the new were in battle. It may be difficult for one who doesn’t paint to visualize the ordeal an artist goes through when his angle of vision is being shifted.

—Mark Tobey, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists (Da Capo Press, 2000), interviews by Katherine Kuh.

essential reins

Imagination, like wild horses, pulls hard and fast under the reins of reality.

free-roam romance

The poem was all horses running on a beach, manes catching sunlight against surf…all that free-roam romance.

thoroughbred books

The difference between the titles given to poetry books and the names that thoroughbred owners give their horses is growing indistinct.