EMPEROR FERDINAND III ON HORSEBACK

The present statuette depicts the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III, scion of the dynastic House of Habsburg, sitting astride a curveting horse preparing to leap gracefully from its hind legs. The bronze is known in one other cast, which was in the Imperial Treasury in Vienna from at least 1750 and is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and which has been conclusively attributed to the great Austrian sculptor Caspar Gras.

THE HABSBURG GROUP OF RIDERS
This bronze belongs to a series of equestrian statuettes that represent different members of the Habsburg family. For an extended discussion of this group see Leithe-Jasper (loc. cit.). Of this group, the majority of which are in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, the equestrian statue of Ferdinand III (inv. no. 6020) can be traced the furthest back to an Imperial Treasury inventory of 1750.

The present bronze was cast with the same technical ingenuity and methodology as the rest of the above group. The body of the horse was cast in one piece, including the hind legs and forelegs to below the carpus. The rest of the forelegs, the head and base of the neck and the tail were all cast separately. The rider’s body, saddle and saddlecloth form one piece; the head, arms below the shoulder, and large bow of the sash are all cast separately. For this entire group the horse was always cast from the same model. The heads are all inserted into the neck aperture and are thus easily interchangeable. In all probability the heads were executed last, when it was known who was to be portrayed (Leithe-Jasper, loc. cit.).

This process would have allowed the sculptor to produce a quantity of extremely high quality and adaptable bronzes, without the excess costs of building up the models and moulds from scratch. The present bronze is seemingly identical to another example of Ferdinand III in Vienna (inv. no. 6020), albeit without the baton, reins and stirrups. A hole to the back of the head of Ferdinand II in the present bronze indicates that he also was originally adorned with a laurel crown. Of all the groups in the series, these are the only two bronzes that are identical, although the unattached head of Leopold I in Vienna is a close variant of the head of the same sitter in the equestrian bronze also in Vienna. It is generally believed that the bronzes were all cast between 1630 and 1658.

CASPAR GRAS
The equestrian statuettes have long been attributed to the Austrian sculptor of German birth, Caspar Gras. Whilst the inspiration for the series came from Giambologna’s Nessus and Deianira, the bronzes are formally close to Caspar Gras’ monumental equestrian statue of Archduke Leopold V in Innsbruck (1623-30). With the latter equestrian portrait Gras became the first European sculptor to realise the feat of executing a monumental bronze equestrian portrait in which the enormous weight of a rearing horse and rider is balanced on the delicate twin points of the horse's rear hooves. This extraordinary technical achievement, which must have made Gras famous far beyond Innsbruck, was surely the catalyst for this series of bronzes that showcase this feat on a smaller scale. Avery notes that ‘the assembled evidence now points beyond reasonable doubt to the authorship of Caspar Gras’ (Avery, op. cit., p. 432).

FERDINAND III HOLY ROMAN EMPEROR
Ferdinand was the fourth child of Emperor Ferdinand II and his first wife, Maria Anna of Bavaria. He became Archduke of Austria in 1621, King of Hungary in 1625, and King of Bohemia in 1627. Having been elected King of the Romans in 1636, he succeeded his father as Holy Roman Emperor in 1637 and the present statuette may have been created around the time of his elevation to Emperor.