Man Controlling Trade: FTC Sculpture and Equestrian Art

Introduction: An Unconventional Equestrian Statue

An unconventional equestrian statue adorns the exterior of the Federal Trade Commission building in Washington, D.C. Rather than riding astride his horse, the man depicted in the statue by Michael Lantz is wrestling with the animal. The physical exertion on the part of both man and horse is immediately apparent in their expressive body language, tense musculature, and fervent facial expressions. Erected in 1942, Man Controlling Trade is deeply symbolic and perfectly representative of the core mission of the FTC. The FTC exists to regulate business, with goals of preventing monopolies, stimulating healthy competition, and encouraging entrepreneurship.

In Lantz's statue, the horse represents unregulated trade. The massive creature is, ironically, one that has been tamed for use by human beings for centuries — if not thousands of years. The horse has been used as a mode of transportation and beast of burden up until the 20th century. However, the horse is also famous for its inherently wild nature, which can never be fully tamed in the way a house cat can be, compared to its feral brethren.

Symbolism of Man and Horse in Lantz's Sculpture

Lantz's horse struggles against the man, wrestling so that it might break free. The iconography is straightforward: commerce and free trade are like wild animals. Unfettered and free, trade will run wild and will never be truly useful to human beings. The potential force of commercial enterprise is symbolized by the strong musculature of the horse and its heavy, determined hooves. There is no need for color in the large-scale sculpture in the round, for movement and form communicate both surface and symbolic meanings.

The man represents human ethics and the highest endeavors of government to provide the means by which to create a civilized market. Without the horse — that is, without commerce — the man would be far less potent. The artist implies a symbiotic relationship between the man and the horse, albeit one that must be initiated and maintained by the human and not the animal. The man stands for human collective action in the form of governmental regulation. Politics, in the purest sense of the word — implying the polis and the community — must work in tandem with the brute force of economic growth.

Form, Motion, and Scale in 'Man Controlling Trade'

There is a great degree of motion embedded in the Lantz sculpture. The man and the horse are unrested, signifying the ongoing struggle between unbridled market forces and the opposing forces of regulation and competition. The horse is substantially larger than the man, rendered in realistic proportions. Lantz therefore creates a David-and-Goliath motif in Man Controlling Trade. If the man were not formidable and powerful, he would have lost the battle with the horse long ago.

As Man Controlling Trade is a sculpture in the round, various angles impart different views of the struggle. Viewed from one angle, the viewer sees that the man's leg has been rendered almost equal in length and girth to that of the horse's. Moreover, the man's musculature is as chiseled and well-defined as the horse's. The horse has met his match; free trade has met its match with the FTC. Using the geometric forms common to socialist art, Lantz also offers a rather compelling view of American commerce at the height of Roosevelt's New Deal.

Man Controlling Trade has few absolute parallels in the world of public art and sculpture. Most equestrian statues are rendered to glorify military leaders rather than to impart a democratic political message. A case in point is Andrea del Verrocchio's fifteenth-century equestrian monument of Bartolommeo Colleoni, located at Campo dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, Italy. The very pedestal upon which the bronze statue is placed is much higher than that used by Lantz and the Federal Trade Commission in Washington. Whereas Lantz conveys the glory of the polis over unmitigated human greed, Verrocchio's monument depicts the singular glory of a military leader. In spite of their different themes, both statues point to the importance of human endeavor — whether in the battle over territorial dispute or the battle for the right to remove barriers to market entry.