The common consensus and the model for artists' depictions of horses held that horses always maintain one foot on the ground at a trot, while at a gallop, on the contrary, all four hooves leave the ground at once, with the horse's front legs stretching forward and its back legs stretched back. Muybridge used his own version of chronophotography to disprove both of these beliefs, beliefs incarnated for centuries in paintings and sculptures. Horses are in fact airborne while trotting, as they are at a gallop. In their galloping stride, all four legs leave the ground as they are drawn up under the horses' bodies, not as they stretch forward and back.
High-speed imaging overcame the limitations of the human eye to produce these renderings of horses' bodies in motion. From one perspective, cinema, because of its abilities to slow down and speed up the world, often has been seen as a kind of revelation machine, illuminating a previously unseen world. From another perspective, however, one stressed in the pioneering work of visual studies, the cinematic apparatus and its companions create a new world, one where the human body can appear at extra-human scales and speeds.
