Gonzaga Crossing the River Taro at Fornovo Vignette- (Formerly from Gewalthaufen Blog)

Splashing Through the River Taro

For the first piece of the Fornovo demo game that I'm planning on putting on at Salute (hopefully with the Lance and Longbow Society, but nothing is written in stone as of yet), my heart was set on doing a vignette of Gonzaga as he charged through the River Taro. This was largely inspired from the artwork of Richard Hook in the Osprey Fornovo 1495, Campaign  book.

I got as far as the planning stages, some might say that it's still in the planning stages although the paint starts to get applied tonight (hurrah!).

OK, so up until now I had the chap below standing in for Gonzaga's banner bearer (with the chap above, on foot, carrying the banner of Venice):

The new Banner Bearer:

All well and good you might think? Well, not really. Although ideal in terms of dynamism and posture the chap above is fully encased in German 'Gothic' style armour and as I was using the Richard III Memorial Miniature as Gonzaga (painted my none other than moi)  from Perry Miniatures who was already encased in armour probably of German origin (if not then an English copy) then the piece was going to lose it's Italian flavor which I was really looking for. The mini also has the advantage of wearing a tabard particular to Italy at the time of the battle.

So, a quick conversion was in order. I took one of the mounted miniatures from the Perry's EA12, Mounted Italian Command packs, the one gesturing with his right hand. I carefully cut his right hand off and to this was added one of the hands (and fingers- if you try this make sure that the fingers are very well bonded to the hand!) and simply drilled through and added a suitable metal banner pole.

Hopefully we have one great model for Gonzaga's somewhat delayed attack across the River Taro near Fornovo.

Painted vignette to follow!