Of trotting horses & angelic words

Eadweard Muybridge’s moving pictures,
Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s moving sounds

When horses trot, do all four hooves leave the ground at the same time? The question spurred a debate in the 1870s among American railroad magnates — a group preoccupied with motion, distance, horses, iron and otherwise. By the time the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge published his aptly titled photo series Animal Locomotion in 1887, he had borrowed a racehorse from railroader Leland Stanford in Palo Alto, California, to settle the debate. Muybridge arranged a series of cameras at intervals in a row, with each camera connected to a wire stretching across the horse’s path. As the horse trotted, tripping the wires one by one, the corresponding camera took a photograph. Muybridge developed the photos and lined them up: motion at such speed had never before been visible to the human eye. The photographs revealed that a horse in trot did indeed have all four hooves off the ground, but only when directly under the horse’s body. It’s said the French equine painter Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier wept with astonishment and disappointment when he saw Muybridge’s miraculous pictures. Like most artists, Meissonier had been painting horses’ four legs stretched out before and behind them mid-trot or gallop, as if in flight. Muybridge’s later invention, the zoopraxiscope, displayed a series of images rapidly enough to animate a horse’s movement, as a form of photographic cinema. He projected these first motion pictures onto walls in San Francisco.