It has admittedly been 17 years since the column, so it has perhaps slipped your mind. But Cecil once addressed the question whether, in an equestrian statue, the number of horse feet raised off the ground indicated something about whether the rider was wounded or killed in battle. He approached the question by a survey of the statues in various places, and concluded that no rule holds generally, and in a place where it holds for a small number of examples the correlation is probably coincidental.
But it would be interesting to know whether there is actually nothing more to the so-well-known idea than this. Were there certain artists who did respect such a system? This might be known through the direct statements of the artist, or (if he produced a lot of equstrian statues) an empirical system like Cecil’s.
Any thoughts on how to address this question?
-Chaim