Vasari is the chief source of these legends. Giraldi Lomazzo, the Milanese historian of painting, and Bandello, the novelist, supply further details. It appears from all accounts that Lionardo impressed his contemporaries as a singular and most commanding personality. There is a touch of reverence in even the strangest stories, which is wanting in the legend of Piero di Cosimo.
Even Michael Angelo, meeting him in Florence, flung in his teeth that "he had made the model of a horse to cast in bronze, and could not cast it, and through shame left it as it was unfinished." See Arch. St. It., serie terza, xvi. 226.
In the Royal Collection at Windsor there is a whole series of studies for these two statues, together with drawings for the mould in which Lionardo intended to cast them. The second of the two is sketched with great variety of motive. The horse is rearing; the fallen enemy is vainly striving to defend himself; the victor in one drawing is reining in his steed, in another is waving a truncheon, in a third is brandishing his sword, in a fourth is holding the sword in act to thrust. The designs for the pedestals, sometimes treated as a tomb and sometimes as a fountain, are equally varied.