Equestrian Statuette of Charlemagne or Charles the Bald
Unknown (Carolingian) · Ninth century (rider); horse ancient, restored in the eighteenth century
A crowned rider sits bolt upright on a walking horse, an orb in his left hand and, once, a sword in his right, now lost. He wears a short cloak over a tunic and looks straight ahead with a broad, moustached face. The bronze is only twenty-four centimetres tall, yet it carries itself like a monument, and that is the point: the pose copies the ancient equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, the image of a Roman emperor that the Carolingian court wanted to claim for its own king. Traces of gilding remain, so the whole figure once shone like gold.
The rider was cast in the ninth century and is usually identified as Charlemagne, though his grandson Charles the Bald has also been proposed. The horse is older, a Roman bronze of late antiquity, and was restored in the eighteenth century. The statuette belonged to the treasury of Metz cathedral, where Alexandre Lenoir found it in 1807 at a bookseller's; after several sales the City of Paris bought it for its future historical museum, and the Carnavalet museum exchanged it with the Louvre in 1934.
Did You Know? The horse is a Roman bronze several centuries older than its rider, patched up in the eighteenth century to carry a Carolingian king.
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