The manageably large figure on the horse cannot say that it is not binary or queer.
However, it is made of ivory, around 1610.
It was carved by the "Furienmeister", whose real name nobody knows.
There is a screaming fury of his in Vienna, she gave the master his “Notnamen”, as it is called.
A name that art history makes do with because the artist is unknown – and often remains so.
The Liebieghaus in Frankfurt has owned "The Fury on a Breezing Horse" since 2019, when the first 168 works from the Reiner Winkler collection were acquired and shown.
Now "White Wedding" has grown again with "Splendid White".
21 other outstanding Baroque works, which remained in his home until Winkler's death in 2020, enrich the collection in the most wonderful way.
Some of the works are tiny, you have to get up close and take your time to discover all the details that artists from Sicily, Bavaria and the carving stronghold of Dieppe have carved from the precious material.
And if you look at Fury, supposedly a Greek goddess of vengeance, if you look at the arms of the female allegory reaching into the void and the body, the neck muscles and the sinews of the "beggar woman with stringed tambourine and child", then the ambiguity of this human Body, this not-quite-feminine, not-quite-male-being, very obvious in these sculptures.
What is ostensibly so clear is not at all.
The artists of the 17th and 18th centuries literally embodied in ivory a look that seems to open up brand-new fields of socio-political discussion for us today.
How might the works have affected the viewer at the time?
And what are they doing today?
A look at the supposedly distant art epoch brings something very close.