Noble fragment - the Medici Riccardi equine bronze

 

Overall size: 81×95×40 centimeters (31 7/8×37 3/8×15 3/4 inches)

Adapted from Getty.edu:

The equine bronze protome known as the Medici Riccardi horse head in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale of Florence is likely a surviving part of a Hellenistic life-size equestrian sculptural group, which has been dated around the second half of the fourth century BC. The sculpture entered the antiquarian collections of the Medici in the fifteenth century and was cited for the first time in 1495 as part of Lorenzo il Magnifico’s antiquarian collection, although it had certainly been found well before that. Its close resemblance to the colossal Carafa horse head in Naples, executed by Donatello between 1456 and 1458 in imitation of this original, provides an indirect terminus ante quem.

The head is also cited in the Confiscation Decree by the Republican Government as being among the artifacts of the garden of the Palazzo Medici. Between 1495 and 1512 it was in Palazzo Vecchio (perhaps in the Cortile della Dogana); then it returned to the aforementioned garden, where it was admired by Lorenzo Bernini in 1665. In 1672 the artwork was restored and adapted as a fountain mouth by Bartolomeo Cennini.

After being moved to Palermo in 1800 in order to avoid confiscation by Napoleon, the head returned to Florence in 1815, when it was displayed at the Galleria degli Uffizi. Finally, in 1890, it was transferred to the Regio Museo Archeologico, now the Museo Archeologico Nazionale of Florence.

During conservation in 2015 widespread traces of gold leaf were found, whose analysis unequivocally demonstrates that the artifact was originally gilded.