Free 101 Things You Didn't Know About Da Vinci by Shana Priwer

during which historians believe he created Bust of a Woman with Flowers .
    In addition to these accomplishments, Leonardo worked on sculptures executed mainly by others in his workshop, such as St. John the Baptist Teaching , a bronze completed in 1511. Giovanni Francesco Rustici, a student originally in the Medici Garden, sculpted this statue in large part. Leonardo and Rustici met in Verrocchio's workshop, and Rustici worked alongside Leonardo for many years afterwards. Rustici could have been famous by way of patronage to popes and kings but, unlike Leonardo, he didn't seem to have much ambition and preferred to be alone. Fortunately, since he came from a wealthy family, he had the luxury of doing as he wished.
    In the early 1500s, Rustici was working with a local merchants' guild commissioned to create bronze statues for the church of San Giovanni. The star attraction was to be a sculpture of St. John the Baptist. As the story goes, Rustici refused to work with anyone except Leonardo, and the two artists probably designed and executed the statues together. Leonardo's contributions to the sculpture are evident in several areas, especially in the hand and finger positions of St. John. Similar positioning can be seen in other Da Vinci works, such as his painting St. John the Baptist , created between 1513 and 1516. The finger pointing is nearly identical to that seen in the San Giovanni sculpture. It is also quite similar, in this respect, to another one of Leonardo's probable paintings, St. John in the Wilderness , which dates from 1510 to 1515.

29
A horse is a horse, of course, of course
    Whether it's yard gnomes, porcelain Santas, or pink flamingos, most of us appreciate some form of small outdoor sculpture. In 1483, Leonardo set about creating the largest statue the world had ever seen. His personal mammoth was a design for an oversized equestrian Statue of Francesco Sforza , mentioned in the previous point. This grand project was begun in honor of Francesco Sforza, the father of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. At more than twenty-four feet high, the statue would have been enormous.
    As explained in number 27, sculpture was never Leonardo's favorite art. But this particular project probably interested Leonardo because of his fascination with nature and animals, especially horses. While this design was a Leonardo original, the notion of capturing a battle scene in sculpture definitely had precedents in Roman and Medieval artwork, and Leonardo probably took cues from the Roman statue of Marcus Aurelius.
    While Leonardo had created many sketches and variations of the design by the early 1490s, he still hadn't built an actual statue. At this point, his patrons were getting impatient, so Leonardo had to hurry and create a full-scale clay model. It was quite a hit and was set up in the garden of the Palazzo Vecchio. People traveled from all over to see this enormous masterpiece, affectionately dubbed “Il Colosso.”
    The clay model did wonders for Leonardo's reputation. People all over Italy knew him as that crazy artist who'd made the fantastic tribute to the Sforza family. The final bronze statue should have been one of Leonardo da Vinci's crowning achievements. He even had to design special furnaces for the bronze casting, since none of the existing furnaces was even close to being large enough.
    Despite the design's immense popularity, it is not certain that this statue ever really could have been built, as there was no precedent at the time for casting a hollow-shell statue (close to two inches thick) on such a large scale. Leonardo and his workshop were in the middle of obtaining bronze (no small task for a statue that would have weighed more than sixty tons) when warfare demands intervened. France was invading Milan, and the bronze Leonardo would have used for the statue was cast into military equipment, such as cannons.
    Adding insult to injury, Leonardo's treasured clay model didn't even survive the war. As