Bartolomeo Colleoni, Warsaw

The mounted figure and horse make up an equestrian monument to Bartolomeo Colleoni, an Italian condottiere who served the Venetian Republic, in the courtyard of Czapski Palace on Krakowskie Przedmieście. This Warsaw sculpture has an unexpectedly travelled past: it is cast from Szczecin’s copy of the Colleoni monument in Venice, dated fourteen seventy-five. Szczecin made its copy for a municipal museum founded in nineteen thirteen, where it commanded the domed gallery.

The monument survived the war, and in June nineteen forty-seven Szczecin gave it to Warsaw, then badly damaged. It reached the capital in nineteen forty-eight after being cut into separate sections. In spring nineteen fifty, Bracia Łopieńscy assembled it here for the Academy of Fine Arts, where the copy was intended as a model for students.

The sculpture now before you arrived in two thousand two, after Szczecin recovered the earlier copy and funded this replacement. Notice the horse’s taut movement and the rider’s forceful outline: this is a Venetian military commander who became part of Warsaw’s art-school landscape.