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Sir John Hawkwood
Monumento equestre a Giovanni Acuto
An English mercenary on horseback, painted to look like a bronze statue on the cathedral wall.
John Hawkwood, an Essex tanner’s son, fought for whoever paid best in fourteenth-century Italy and ended up captain-general of Florence’s army. The city promised him a marble monument in the cathedral; when he died in 1394, it never came.
In 1436 Paolo Uccello painted one instead, in greenish earth colours so that the horse and rider look like bronze, standing on a plinth seen from below. Twenty years later Andrea del Castagno painted another condottiere, Niccolò da Tolentino, beside it. Stand before it in 3D ›
