Persistence of da Vinci, Dent converge in unveiling

October 03, 2002|By Judith Green Special to The Morning Call - Freelance

It has taken more than 500 years to finish Leonardo da Vinci's last masterpiece, and though it's a long way from Italy to Allentown, time and place have at last converged.

On Friday, at the start of a weekend's worth of activities dubbed "Leonardo's Imagination," when the 12-foot-high replica of the enormous bronze horse that stands in the Piazza della Liberta in Milan, is unveiled at the Baum School of Art in Allentown, the event will pay homage not so much to a sculpture, however noble, but to the persistence of vision: that of the artist, Leonardo da Vinci, who dared to think in such grandiose terms and who watched his 16-year project ground to rubble under the heel of war; and that of Charles C. Dent, the airline pilot who embarked on a crusade more than 20 years ago to look through the eyes of Leonardo and finish this immense project.

Saturday's all-day celebration in downtown Allentown is being touted as "an intelligent festival," incorporating the kind of games, crafts and activities that require as much mental ingenuity as physical ability. Every activity is based, even if tangentially, on the astonishing creations of da Vinci. There is an electric vehicle race for children; da Vinci built a spring-powered car in 1615, which has been called by one scholar "the first automated programmable computer in human history." There will be flights of birds and aircrafts, mirroring da Vinci's legendary interest in flight. There also will be a one-quarter-scale model of the Space Shuttle; many a science-fiction devotee is sure that da Vinci was the first man to travel to the moon on his rocket-sledge.

The centerpiece of "Leonardo's Imagination," of course, is the horse, Il Cavallo, a work da Vinci never finished. The man who enabled its completion, Allentown native Charles C. Dent, is billed as a supporting actor to the artist and inventor he admired so deeply. And that is probably the way Dent would have wanted it.

The horse was commissioned by Leonardo's longtime patron, Duke Ludovico Sforza of the city-state of Milan. Leonardo was a painter; he had not attempted much in sculpture since his student days, and never on so grand a scale. He spent nearly 16 years working out the mechanics of the horse's construction and of casting it in bronze, which he wanted to do in a single piece. As Edgar Degas was to learn three centuries later, the armature -- the internal framework that held the whole assemblage together -- was extremely difficult. Not only did it function as the horse's substructure and skeleton, but it also insured the balance and stability of the sculpture, which was designed to stand on three legs, with the fourth pawing the air.

Leonardo never did solve all the construction problems, but he completed a full-scale clay model of the horse and bought tons of bronze in preparation for its casting. He had invented a new casting process that he thought would guard against cracking, always a danger in handling large pieces of bronze as they cooled. But he never got the chance to try it out, for the Duke went to war against the French in 1494 and melted all the bronze down into cannon. Five years later, when the French reached Milan, their archers used the huge clay horse, still standing on the grounds of the Sforza estate, as a target for archery practice. By the time the war ended, the horse was in ruins, and the project was never resumed.

In 1977, Charles C. Dent read a piece in National Geographic about the unfinished horse. The Upper Macungie Township resident was seized by the desire to complete it, as a tribute to Leonardo and a gift from the American people.

Peter Dent, his nephew, who heads the non-profit organization Leonardo da Vinci's Horse Inc., which organized the Il Cavallo project, describes his uncle as a 20th-century Renaissance man in his own right. Charles C. Dent was a gifted draftsman and painter. He collected art of the 14th and 15th centuries not in a systematic way, but by what attracted him, says his nephew. After his uncle's death, his collection was sold to support the Il Cavallo project -- "hay for the horse," his nephew jokes.

They were kindred spirits, Leonardo da Vinci and Charles C. Dent, with questing minds and wide interests. Charles C. Dent spent time researching the horse, the construction of such an immense and weighty object, and the bronze casting process. Before he died in 1994 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (better known as Lou Gehrig's disease), he persuaded his nephew, Peter, to give up his work in the semiconductor industry to take over the foundation.

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