“For many centuries, the image of the rider has maintained an epic character [...] For the majority of our contemporaries, the horse has acquired a mythical character […] the horse has been transformed into a kind of dream, into a fabulous animal.”
One of the most important sculptors of the 20th century, Marino Marini created an inimitable body of work whose sensitivity to form and surface extends back to the ancient Etruscans of his native Italy and culminates in bold, emotional abstractions conceived in his later years (figs. 1 & 2). Additionally, much of Marini’s inspiration came through his contemporaries. During the interwar period, Marini traveled often between Zurich and Basel, where he befriended Alberto Giacometti and Germaine Richier—two artists whose work would also be transformed by the terrors of the Second World War (figs. 3 & 4). Indeed, having directly experienced both Fascist rule and the violent destruction of his country by Allied bombings, a profound awareness of the fragility of man and the uncertainty of his position in the modern age began to pervade Marini’s oeuvre. This is perhaps best exemplified in his later horse and equestrian figures, a motif which, as images of distinction and nobility, had long been symbolic of man's mastery over the world around him.
Right: Fig. 2 Bronze statuette of a Scythian mounted archer, Etruscan, 5th century BCE, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
“If the whole earth is destroyed in our atomic age, I feel that the human forms which may survive as mere fossils will have become sculptures similar to mine.”
Right: Fig. 4 Alberto Giacometti, Le Nez, 1947, Sold: Sotheby’s, New York, 15 November 2021, lot 14 for $78,396,000 © 2021 ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK
Just as the war turned the modern world upside down, Piccolo cavallo demonstrates this expressive shift which ensued in Marini’s practice. No longer satisfied with renderings of stoic figures on horseback, Marini, like many artists after the war, invested his work with an emotional intensity that had not been present in his earlier sculpture. The shift was most pronounced in the Cavalieri series, in which the riders now seemed to freeze with terror or brace themselves for the imminent bucking of their horses. As Sam Hunter notes, “The evolution from the heroic to the tragic in Marini’s art began around 1945, at the close of the war, when he was overwhelmed by the negative implications of the dawn of an era that promised the vast, perhaps total destruction of civilization with the touch of a button” (Sam Hunter, Marino Marini. The Sculpture, New York 1993, p. 24).
“My equestrian figures are symbols of the anguish that I feel when I survey contemporary events […] Little by little, my horses become more restless, their riders less and less able to control them. Man and beast are both overcome by a catastrophe much like those that struck Sodom and Pompeii.”
Beyond the artist’s lived experience of the war years, the contemporary influence of Picasso's Guernica cannot be underestimated as a visual source for the stark, jarring forms of Marini’s mature horses and riders (fig. 5). The dramatic jolt of the horse's body in Piccolo cavallo, its head and neck fully extended, nods to the pose and expression of the horse in the center of the twenty-five-foot composition, lost in the chaos of the scene.
© 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
During the War, Marini was moved to isolate the horse from its rider, focusing on the jarring presence of a horse abandoned. The artist explained, "the whole history of humanity and nature lies in the figure of horse and rider in every period. In the beginning there was a 'harmony' between them, but in the end, in contrast to this unity, the violent world of the machine arrives" (quoted in G. and G. Guastalla, eds., Marino Marini, Pistoia 1979, pp. 29-30). The brutal terror ushered in by the machine age segregated the horse from its rider, and in the lone equine figure of Piccolo cavallo, Marini recast the harmonious union of man and nature as a relationship fraught with struggle and powerlessness.
"Equestrian statues have always served, through the centuries, a kind of epic purpose. They set out to exalt a triumphant hero [...] But the nature of the relationship which existed for centuries between man and the horse has changed […] In the past fifty years, this ancient relationship between man and beast has been entirely transformed. The horse has been replaced, in its economic and military functions, by the machine, the tractor, the automobile or the tank. It has become a prime symbol of sport or of decadent luxury, and, in the minds of most of our contemporaries, it is rapidly becoming a kind of lost myth" (quoted in Sam Hunter, ibid., p 24).
