The Eternal Horse
in Art 

(Art History) Long before humanity learned to write, it learned to draw horses. In the caves of Lascaux, painted some 17,000 years ago, horses emerge from the stone walls with astonishing confidence. Their bodies are rounded and muscular, their movements captured with a sensitivity that feels almost contemporary. Looking at them today, one wonders what compelled prehistoric humans to spend precious hours in the darkness of caves depicting these animals. Why horses? Why not lions, bears, or even themselves?

Perhaps because the horse represented something humanity recognized long before it could name it: power. Not the power of kings or armies, but a force larger than oneself. Fast, elegant, elusive, and yet capable of becoming a companion, the horse occupies a curious position in human history. It is both wild and familiar, a creature humans have never stopped projecting their desires onto. For thousands of years, it has appeared wherever humans sought to understand movement, freedom, beauty, conquest, or fear.
 No other animal has travelled through the history of art with such persistence.

From Animal to Symbol
The rise of civilization transformed the horse from animal into symbol. As kingdoms expanded and empires rose, horses became instruments of conquest and status. Art followed closely. Across centuries, rulers repeatedly chose to be depicted on horseback, turning the equestrian portrait into one of the most enduring genres in art history. One of the earliest examples is the bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, created around 175 CE. The emperor sits calmly atop his horse, projecting a vision of absolute control. More than a millennium later, Renaissance artists revived this language of power. Donatello’s Gattamelata and Verrocchio’s Bartolomeo Colleoni transformed military commanders into heroic figures, immortalized in bronze and elevated above ordinary men.

No artist studied the horse more obsessively than Leonardo da Vinci. Commissioned to create the largest horse sculpture of his time, he spent years filling notebooks with anatomical sketches. The monument was never completed because the bronze intended for the horse was ultimately melted down to produce cannons. A fitting irony: the animal meant to celebrate power became a casualty of war.

Perhaps the most revealing equestrian portrait is Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps from 1801. Napoleon actually crossed the mountain pass on a mule, yet David painted him astride a rearing stallion.

Ideals in Blue
Yet some of the most fascinating horses in art history have little to do with power. One of them hung for years above my parents’ bed. In the early 1990s, long before online shops and on-demand printing services, my mother became captivated by a painting by Franz Marc. She wanted a reproduction of one of his horses, and obtaining it became something of a family mission. My father and I searched for someone who could reproduce the image on canvas. It required effort, phone calls, and patience. Looking back, it seems extraordinary that a century after its creation, a German Expressionist horse had travelled from an artist’s studio into the private space of an ordinary bedroom.

Writing this article made me think about what it actually was that made Marc’s horses so irresistible. Franz Marc did not paint horses as animals; rather as ideals. His famous blue horses inhabit a world untouched by industry, war, or modern anxiety. For Marc, animals possessed a spiritual purity that humanity had lost. Their colors were symbolic rather than realistic and their forms became vessels for hope, innocence, and possibly even dreams. Perhaps that is why his horses continue to resonate. They are not representations of simple animals; they are representations of longing.

Always in Motion
The 20th century, however, has had different stories to tell. While Marc’s horses dream, Pablo Picasso’s horse in Guernica screams. Painted in response to the bombing of the Spanish town in 1937, the monumental canvas contains one of the most haunting animal figures in art history. At its center, a horse twists in agony. The image feels worlds apart from the serenity of Marc’s blue creatures. Here, the horse becomes a witness to violence, a victim of modern warfare, a symbol of suffering rather than freedom. Between Marc and Picasso lies one of the great shifts in modern art: the loss of innocence.

Contemporary artists have continued this transformation. Horses still appear in galleries and museums, yet rarely as noble companions. In the works of artists such as Michaël Borremans or Maurizio Cattelan, they often seem displaced, fragmented, suspended between life and death. Cattelan’s taxidermied horses, hanging from ceilings or crashing into walls, overturn centuries of heroic imagery. The animal that once carried emperors now appears vulnerable and tragic, becoming a metaphor that expresses human psychology and grievance.

Horses have mostly vanished from our daily life; the majority of us no longer depend on them, yet they continue to occupy our imagination. We encounter them in paintings, films, sculptures, logos, literature, and childhood memories. Every era reinvents the horse according to its own concepts and concerns. For prehistoric hunters, it represented survival; for rulers, power; for Franz Marc, spiritual redemption; for Picasso, catastrophe. In the 21st century, the horse seems to carry traces of all these meanings at once.

Perhaps that is why, after thousands of years, we still return to it. The horse is not merely an object in the history of art. It is one of humanity’s oldest mirrors.