According to a common theory, the number of supporting legs in equestrian statues traditionally depends on how their riders lost their lives. We checked how believ is this theory.

As the city legend says, if the horse has both front legs raised on the statue of the rider, this means that a person died in battle. If the horse has only one leg, then a person died from the wounds received in the battle. If the horse has all four legs on earth, then a person has died a natural death.

This sculptural tradition is reported by resources such as Rosbalt, QuizzClub.com, some Periodic publicationsdifferent Services answers to questionsas well as numerous guides. The legend and on West.

The reader may immediately have a question: what about "Copper horseman"? The most famous equestrian statue of Russia clearly does not correspond to the popular theory - Peter I counts, died in the Winter Palace from the disease. However, supporters of the theory may have their arguments: firstly, this is one individual monument, and secondly, it was erected for a long time, in 1782, when the rule could not work yet.

The issue could be solved by the mention of the rule in serious publications devoted to art and, in particular, sculpture. However, we could not meet such a thing there or our predecessors. Edition Rosbalt refers to a certain publication on the Yoread portal, which allegedly talks about the patterns found by British scientists based on the study of 40,000 equestrian statues from ancient Rome to the present day. That's just today the article from the aforementioned portal is deleted, there are no traces of the original study. It seems extremely unlikely that the global tradition, it actually exist, can be transmitted from the master to the master without any fixation in written sources for centuries and for millennia.

It must be said that not only ordinary citizens believe in the legend. So, in 1971 in New Orleans arose Mini-scandal Regarding the “wrong” posture of the legs at the horse on one of the local monuments, and the former mayor of the city Viktor Shirou confirmed the “mistake”. However, he did not bring any serious arguments.

In 1982, they became interested in an authoritative American newspaper The Washington Post. It is believed that it is in the capital of the United States that there are more horse statues than in any other city in the world-as many as three dozen. And if you look at the monuments of the generals Grant, Sheridana or Sherman, then the theory seems to work: all three have died in peacetime, and their horses are located all four hooves on Earth:

But if we look at the monument to the Latin American revolutionary Simon Bolivar, as well as monuments to US Presidents George Washington And Andrew Jackson, then we will see a contradiction - all three also died their death, but at least one hoof of their horses is in the air:

In total, as journalists calculated, out of 30 Washington statues of theory, only ten, that is, one third. If we take into account that the rule describes the three positions of the horse’s legs (one, two and four hooves on the ground), then in the general case the probability of an accidental hit is the same 33%. And if we take into account that horse-drawn monuments with four supporting legs are easier to design, and the majority of people who have died with their death is the majority, then the probability of coincidence is increasing.

In 1989, legend turned to a popular column of questions and answers The Straight Dope. The authors studied two dozen horse monuments, but this time not only American, but scattered around the world. The result was disappointing: about half of the figures did not correspond to the theory. Journalists turned to US Army Military History Centerwhere they confirmed that such a tradition never existed. Deny it in Historical Society of Virginia. Moreover, many sources as an example in favor of the theory give statues of participants Battle of Gettisberg. However, there we can only talk about six separate horse figures (out of about 500), and the horse of the deceased General John Reynolds raised one front and one back legs. Perhaps this very small sample gave rise to a well -known legend. Note that her Delassed Even in the American collection of popular delusions, published in the far of 1923. And no serious arguments have appeared in her favor since then.