A running horse has twenty legs
The blur of legs wasn’t a whim. It was almost a literal illustration of something the Futurist painters had written down two years earlier. The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (1910), the one Balla signed, declared, in its own words, that “all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing” and, in the line this picture all but acts out, that “a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular.” Balla simply swapped the racehorse for a dachshund. (One thing the manifesto does notsay, despite what you’ll sometimes read, is anything at all about dogs. There is no “dog passage” the painting illustrates. The documented example is the horse, and the dog is Balla’s own affectionate downsizing of it.)
The idea underneath the slogan is something you can test on yourself right now. It is called persistence of vision: a moving object doesn’t register on your eye as a clean snapshot but smears, briefly, into the positions it just left, which is why a waved sparkler draws a line of light and a fast-spinning wheel looks like a transparent disc. Your eye holds each image for a fraction of a second after it’s gone, so a fast-moving thing piles its recent positions on top of one another. The Futurists took that smear, that pile-up of positions, and decided it was more honest than a frozen outline. A photograph stops time, which is a lie, because nothing in the world actually holds still. They wanted to paint the smear. Balla’s swarm of dog-legs is exactly the “twenty legs” idea: not how the dog looks in one stopped instant, but how its trotting feet pile up in the eye that watches them.
And here the painters had help from an unlikely place: science. Back in the 1880s, decades before Futurism, two men had already photographed exactly this pile-up. In France, the scientist Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) invented chronophotography (from the Greek chronos, “time”: literally “time-photography”). He rigged cameras to fire many exposures onto a single photographic plate, so that one running man or one flying bird came out as a row of overlapping ghost-figures across one frame, a single body caught in a dozen successive positions at once. In America, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge(1830–1904) did a related thing with a bank of cameras tripped one after another, and famously settled a bet about whether a galloping horse ever has all four hooves off the ground at once (it does). Marey’s single-plate overlap is the closer cousin of what Balla painted: one body, many positions, all on one surface.
How directly Balla worked from these motion studies is worth being careful about. He was demonstrably fascinated by them, and the dog picture reads like a chronophotograph turned into oil paint, the same overlapping ghost-positions, the same row of phases of one moving body. But whether he sat down with a specific Marey or Muybridge plate and copied from it is not something we can pin to anything Balla himself said, so the dog is not a copy of any one photograph. What is not in doubt, though, is the genealogy. Chronophotography is the documented source of the entire motion-painting toolkit the Futurists worked with: the blur, the multiplication, the overlapping phases all came out of the photographs first. Balla didn’t need a particular plate. He inherited the idea the plates had already made visible, and arrived at the same truth in paint, by a man who had clearly looked at the photographs.