Painters applied the same insights to the study of animals.

Dürer’s Knight, Death, and the

Devil famously pictures a geometrically constructed horse, and he even intended to publish a

whole treatise on the topic, which was pirated soon after his death in 1528 by Hans Sebald
Beham. Beham’s Maß oder proporcion der ross would soon be followed by the model books of

the German printmakers Erhard Schön and Hans Lautensack. Each of these artists came up with
a subtly different solution to picturing a proportionate horse. For Beham, the abstract horse could

be constructed in a few steps, starting with a large square, divided into nine small squares. Into
this grid he introduced numerous smaller geometrical forms and then inscribed his ideal horse

into the carefully measured plane.

Image from Hans Sebald Beham's Maß oder proporcion der ross (1528)
— Source. (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
 Image from Hans Sebald Beham's Maß oder proporcion der ross (1528)
— Source. (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

While Beham was interested in establishing the mathematical proportions of the lateral horse
across a plane, Erhard Schön extended these considerations to three dimensions. Unlike Beham
and Schön, Lautensack did not think that the horse needed to be inscribed in a previously
established geometrical plane or space. One could simply construct it by drawing two circles of

equal size next to each other, one for the frontal part and one for the buttocks, and then by
drawing a set of straight lines that determined the length of the legs, the neck, and the head.
 Image from Lautensack's Perspectiva (1618) — Source. (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Passe's innovation was to extend the repertory of animal figures to elephants as well as to bears,

lions, or rabbits. Yet, for Passe, as for his predecessors, the question of the horse was even more
pressing than that of the elephant. Building upon his predecessors, he carefully analyzed the

proportions of the horse in a series of images, both in two and three dimensions, paying special
attention to the shape of the head.

Grids for a horse from Crispin van de Passe's 't Light der teken en
schilderkonst (1643)— Source.
 Grids for a horse's head from Crispin van de Passe's 't Light der teken en
schilderkonst (1643)— Source.

The geometry of the horse was crucial for Passe, whose personal life and profession brought him

into daily contact with the animals. He was earning his living by offering lessons at the
renowned riding academy of Antoine Pluvinel in the old palace of the Louvre. One may venture

the thought that his students were probably more interested in riding than in limning elephants.
Passe was also the illustrator of Pluvinel's Maneige Royal, the crowning achievement and

theoretical condensation of the riding master's work; he saw it through the press after the
author’s untimely death. Our Flemish artist peppered the Maneige Royal with images of perfectly

proportionate horses, on occasion explicitly borrowing from his 't Light der teken en
schilderkonst.