Emilian School, second half of the 17th century, A wooded landscape with a man pulling a horse by its tail

The subject is taken from Plutarch's Life of Quintus Sertorius where the motif of a man pulling a horse's tail is used to exemplify the strength and virtue of perseverance. Confronted with men displaying a barbaric lack of discipline, Sertorius called a general assembly and introduced before it two horses; one very weak and elderly, the other large and strong, with a tail "astonishing for the thickness and beauty of its hair". By the feeble horse he placed a robust man and by the powerful horse a small man. Given the signal, the strong man seized the tail of his horse with both hands and tried to pull it towards him with all his might whilst the weak man, using a different tactic, began to pluck out the hairs in his horse's tail one by one. The strong man failed and gave up in his attempt whereas the weak man, seemingly without trouble, stripped his horse's tail of its hair. Sertorius then rose up and said: "Ye see, men of my allies, that perseverance is more efficacious than violence, and that many things which cannot be mastered when they stand together yield when one masters them little by little". The subject was first identified by Dr. Jennifer Montagu in relation to a drawing by an artist in the circle of Johann Wilhelm Bauer. Another representation of it is Otto van Veen's illustration for the motto "Festina lente" in his Emblemata Historiana (p. 69): both images are to be found at the Warburg Institute, London. We are grateful to Nicholas Turner for the above information.