Goethe had lifelong unhappy memories of his early riding lessons at the Frankfurt Marstall. Yet not only did he become a passionate rider later, but he also held riding in unusually high esteem as a veritable form of ‘art’. In his literary works, riding serves as a complex symbol of, among other things, a prudent, measured style of government, an analogy that was also drawn in early modern equestrian theory. Above all, however, according to his understanding of art, riding can be located not only in the early modern system of the artes, but also in the contemporary aesthetics of autonomy.

In 1735, the Leipzig professor of medicine Samuel Theodor Quellmaltz (1696–1758) designed and built an artificial horse. He presented it in an illustrated construction manual, which included precise information about the materials and dimensions of this wooden horse for therapeutic use. This contribution analyses Quellmaltz’s invention of the ‘machine horse’ as a medical and technological contribution to prevalent theories about the paradigmatic role of the machine in Enlightenment thought.