As they salt the roads for ice and the mercury falls below par, it is time for a last venture to Seville of 2013 for my friend and colleague Nicolás Haro’s exhibition of photography of the psychological and behavioural ties between humans and horses.
Packed and back on the road…
Nicolás took the contemporary black and white images which illustrated my book Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight (Profile Books, London, 2011, finalist, William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2011.)
Since I contributed the introduction to the exhibition’s catalogue, it was nice to have an excuse to flee the chill. As for why it belongs on a blog about bullfighting, well… I’ll start with Nicolas’s words and then mine (in the English original.)
Alexander Fiske-Harrison
Dear Friends,
By virtue of my relationship with various bull breeders, I take the liberty of addressing myself to you, to inform you that, during the week of SICAB, Salon Internacional de Caballos de Pura Raza Española, which I understand that you or your associates will be attending, I will be inaugurating an exhibition centred on the figure of the horse, with all of its emotional vitality.This exhibition is produced with the support of the ganadería Estirpe Cárdenas, The Real Maestranza de Caballería de Sevilla, and Bodegas Infantes de Orleáns y Borbón.
To this end I attach an invitation to the exhibition, which I trust will be of interest to you. I will be delighted to meet you personally at stand number 2164/2165, where the exhibition will be held. On Wednesday evening I am pleased to invite you to a cup of sherry from 7:30 on; the exhibition will be open throughout the week.
I look forward to seeing you there.
Best regards,
Nicolás Haro Fernández de Córdoba
The horse: Our last love…
Of all the major animals that man has taken into his home, the horse was the last.
The first was the wolf, which not only gave us the dog, but changed us forever. How different the tribe which had to risk its braves facing the bison and mammoth with spears, to the one which could merely wound with a few well-placed arrows and then unleash the pack to bring the beast down many miles distant.
However, after that ally, all the animals we brought into the house – cattle, sheep, goats, chickens – were much briefer and less honoured guests whose short lives ended in our stomachs.
Not so, the horse. If anything, he lifted man out of such base and basic interests. A horse gave a man a metre more height, twenty kilometres per hour more speed, and 400 kilos more muscle. He made a man into more than he was before, which is why the first men on horses, probably nomadic Asian tribes, when seen by those who could not ride such as the first Minoan Greeks, gave rise to the myth of the ‘centaur’, half man, half horse.
The centaur also represented the deep and ever-present connection which must be present between horse and rider. Cattle can be herded and need not have their bestial nature altered, only diminished: the minotaur merely blundered around the labyrinth of Crete, while the combination of man and wolf -the lycanthrope or werewolf – was more savage still. However, in classical tradition, Chiron, a centaur was tutor and mentor to Theseus, Achilles, Jason and Perseus.
Away from myth, horses made men into more than they were because of their role in war, from which the original notions of nobility were derived. Caballero in Castilian, Chevalier in French, Cavalier in English, all mean both horseman and someone who is more than a common man. A knight was defined by his horse, both literally – he must possess one – and abstractly, the code he followed, that of chivalry, owes its etymology to the horse as well.
Horses, literally and figuratively, raised man up. However, what of the animal itself? Although the horse assisted man’s warlike nature, man himself could not live in a state of war with an animal that had to bear him into battle. The oldest breed of horse, the four and a half millenia Arabian – whose blood flows so strongly in both the pure race of Spain and thoroughbred of England – had to live within the tent with his Bedouin masters, which, in an animal so large, required one of intelligence, sensitivity, physical control and grace and the ability to understand his master and, most of all, to make himself understood. Hundreds of kilos of undemonstrative terror or anger cannot long live happily in the house of human beings. The most communicative, intuitive and attuned to the human psyche would have been selected for, just as much as the courageous and the strong, the tireless and the obedient.
It is this vital psychic kinship between man and animal that the photos of my friend and colleague Nicolás have so elegantly captured, a kinship which I myself was brought up to feel and have witnessed in Nicolás in his dealings with horses as well as the art he has made from them. His images contain so many of the emotions we share: pride, fear, playfulness, despair, resignation and power. They are a reminder although the centaur – like the unicorn and the pegasus – may not exist: we have much to learn from pondering the very real ethological and psychological origins of these ideas.
Copyright Alexander Fiske-Harrison December 2012
The Last Arena 
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