Two Notes on the Flying Gallop

Abstract

I THE POSTURE illustrated by the horse in Fig. 1 is known in the history of art as the flying gallop. Nineteenth century painters and draftsmen in Europe and America very often represented galloping horses in this posture; such pictures are doubtless familiar to all readers of this journal. I believe it to be a fact that no horse ever approaches this posture while galloping over a level surface; the real posture occupied by a galloping horse when all four feet are in the air may be typified by Fig. 2. This fact was demonstrated by instantaneous photography during the 1870's. The illusion of the flying gallop had become so firmly fixed in the public mind by that time that some experienced observers are said to have doubted the accuracy of the photographs. In 1900 and 1901 Salamon Reinach traced the history of the flying gallop as an artistic concept in ancient, medieval, and modern times in a series of brilliant and profoundly learned articles 2 which appear to have colored all subsequent discussions of the subject. Reinach's long and elaborately documented thesis has been well summed up by Berthold Laufer: According to the ingenious investigations of this French archaeologist, this conventional motive appears neither in Assyria nor in Egypt, neither in the classical art of Greece nor in that of Etruria or Rome, nor in European art of the middle ages, the Renaissance, and the present age up to the time of the French Revolution (p. 11), when, in 1794, it appears for the first time in a popular engraving in England (p. 113). More than a millennium anterior to our era, how-