Horse racing: Unnatural selection in the renaissance

Abstract

This article uses the renaissance culture of horse racing as a window into the practices and language of breeding, artifice, and race. The popular palio racing circuit brought local and foreign horses into Italian city centers to test their speed. Racing culture, and other formal and informal competitions related to animals incentivized the development of specialized horse breeds called razze in Italian; this term is a precursor of the modern English “race.” To make these animals, renaissance patrons and animal experts engaged in unnatural selection. Their selective breeding efforts committed more to growing than weeding, aimed to create horses as works of art, branded animals so that they would be recognizable and cemented a discourse of race that emphasized the reproductive and training work of sponsored experts. This synthetic overview meditates on the transhistorical language of breeding and the consequences of excluding animals from our historical understanding of the making of the idea of race.