Equestris Ars Mater Artium: A Cultural Genealogy of Equestrian Art

Equestris Ars Mater Artium: A Cultural Genealogy of Equestrian Art

Rodolfo Nello Lorenzini

Abstract

Equestrian art played a central role in European culture from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, shaping the grammar of gesture, the aesthetics of movement, and the emergence of ballet. Despite its historical significance, it has been progressively excluded from modern classifications of the arts, overshadowed by newer media such as photography, cinema, and digital arts. This document proposes a cultural genealogy of equestrian art as mater artium, examining its influence on dance, its survival through photographic representation, and the political and aesthetic reasons behind its modern marginalization. Drawing on art history, performance studies, gesture theory, and visual culture — including the work of Agamben, Didi‑Huberman, Eco, and Gouraud — the International Center for the Study of Animal Culture and Society argues for a renewed recognition of equestrian art within contemporary artistic taxonomies. The Senofonte Prize, with its focus on photography and narrative, is presented as a contemporary platform for reactivating this forgotten lineage and fostering new forms of cultural engagement.

 Keywords

Equestrian Art; Ballet; Gesture Studies; Performance History; Visual Culture; Photography; Cultural Genealogy; Renaissance Studies; Art Taxonomy; Aesthetics; Animal Studies; Gesture Theory.

 Equestris Ars Mater Artium: A Cultural Genealogy of Equestrian Art

In the history of Western arts, certain genealogies—though evident—have gradually faded from view. Among them, the relationship between equestrian art, dance, and the performing arts occupies a singular place: a cultural nexus that shaped European imagination for centuries, yet is almost absent from modern classifications of the arts.

 Historical sources and contemporary aesthetic reflections show that equestrian art was long regarded as a primary form of gesture, a laboratory of movement, balance, and relational intelligence that deeply influenced the birth of ballet and the grammar of modern performance.

 Recent theoretical contributions — from Agamben’s reflections on gesture, to Didi‑Huberman’s work on the survival of images, to Gouraud’s studies on the transmission of forms — allow us to reconsider equestrian art not as a marginal practice, but as a foundational matrix of European aesthetics.

 1. An art born from gesture and relation

Between the Renaissance and the Baroque, equestrian art was not a technical discipline nor a functional training. It was an aesthetic practice. The figures of Haute École—corvette, half‑turn, cadence—were understood as forms of knowledge: gestures that united strength and measure, power and suspension.

 The rider did not “control” the horse; he shaped a shared form with it. The horse did not “execute”; it revealed a movement whose value lay in the gesture itself.  

In this sense, equestrian art anticipates what contemporary philosophy calls gesture: an action that does not aim at an external goal, but unfolds as a form of life (Agamben). And, following Gouraud, it can be understood as a transmitted form, a gesture that survives through bodies, practices, and images.

 2. The forgotten genealogy of ballet

In the Italian and French courts of the sixteenth century, a decisive transformation occurred: court dance—and later ballet—emerged by observing and translating equestrian figures.  

The pirouette, the half‑turn, the vertical suspension: before becoming dance steps, they were movements of the horse. The human body learned to dance by watching the horse. Dance, therefore, is not an “independent” art: it is a derivation, a transposition, a daughter of equestrian art.  

Rotations in other cultures: ritual, not form

Across many cultures, rotation appears as a universal gesture: in shamanic rituals, in Central Asian dances, in African ceremonial practices, and—most famously—in the whirling tradition of the Mevlevi dervishes. Yet in all these contexts, rotation is not a codified dance step. It is a rite, a continuous movement linked to trance, ecstasy, and spiritual elevation. It is not geometry, not choreography, not form.  

European dance of the sixteenth century is the first to transform rotation into an aesthetic figure—measured, symmetrical, and formally articulated. And this transformation does not originate in ritual, but in the observation of the horse: the half‑turn and the pirouette derive directly from the figures of the Haute École. Rotation becomes art only when it enters the system of Renaissance gesture.  

3. Photography as a space of survival for equestrian imagery

Photography—today recognized as the eighth art—plays a decisive role in the contemporary recovery of equestrian art. It does not merely document movement: it suspends it, preserves it, renders it visible as an image that survives its own time.  

Every photograph of an equestrian performance is an act of revelation: it shows what modernity has forgotten, reopens a genealogy, restores dignity to an ancient gesture.  

Photography also reveals the deep kinship between equestrian rotation and human rotation: the shared logic of suspension, axis, and circularity that links the Haute École turn to the dancer’s pirouette. In this sense, photography becomes a space where these genealogies — equestrian and choreographic — reappear together.  

4. Modern removal and the need for a new taxonomy

With the Enlightenment and the rise of modern sport, equestrian art was progressively excluded from the arts. Not for aesthetic reasons, but for cultural and political ones: the distinction between “pure” arts and “utilitarian” disciplines relegated equestrian art to the realm of technique.  

The result is an incomplete taxonomy that recognizes as autonomous arts forms that emerged much later—photography, cinema, comics, video games—while ignoring a tradition that shaped gesture, dance, and representation for centuries.  

To recognize equestrian art as mater artium is not to claim nostalgic primacy, but to restore coherence to the history of the arts.  

5. The role of the Senofonte Prize in cultural repositioning

In this context, the Senofonte Prize is not merely a competition: it is a cultural operation. The opening of categories dedicated to photography and narrative responds not to a celebratory need, but to a broader project: to reconstruct the genealogy of equestrian art, to give it discourse, language, and a community of gazes.  

Through images and words, the Senofonte Prize invites artists, photographers, scholars, and practitioners to participate in a collective reflection on the role of equestrian art in European cultural history.  

6. A perspective for the twenty‑first century

Today, in an era in which the arts are constantly redefining themselves, equestrian art can once again become what it has always been: a space of relation, a laboratory of gesture, a form of knowledge.  

To recognize it as mater artium is to acknowledge that the history of the arts is not a linear sequence, but a constellation of forms that influence, transform, and survive one another.  

The International Center for the Study of Animal Culture and Society offers this document as an invitation to reopen the discussion, reconsider genealogies, and restore equestrian art to its rightful place in contemporary culture.  

Bibliography

Primary Sources on Equestrian Art 

Grisone, F. Gli ordini di cavalcare. Napoli, 1550.

Fiaschi, C. Trattato dell’imbrigliare, maneggiare et ferrare cavalli. Ferrara, 1556.

Newcastle, W. Cavendish. A General System of Horsemanship. London, 1743.  

Dance and Performance Studies

McGowan, M. Dance and the Court of Louis XIV. Routledge, 2014.

Franko, M. Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body. Oxford University Press, 2015.  

Gesture, Aesthetics, and Cultural Theory

Agamben, G. “Notes on Gesture.” In Means Without End. University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Sennett, R. The Craftsman. Yale University Press, 2008.

Gouraud, M. Le Geste et sa Mémoire: Études sur la Transmission des Formes. Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2019.

 Photography and Visual Culture

Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want? University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Batchen, G. Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History. MIT Press, 2001.