Marino Marini

Acquired by the family of the present owner circa 1960

Patrick Waldberg, Herbert Read & Gualtieri di San Lazzaro, Marino Marini, Complete Works, New York, 1970, no. 344, illustration of another cast p. 264
Carlo Pirovano, Marino Marini. Scultore, Milan, 1972, no. 350
Marino Marini, Tokyo, 1978, no. 172, illustration of another cast
Carlo Pirovano (ed.), Marino Marini - Catalogo del Museo San Pancrazio di Firenze, Milan, 1988, pl. 164, illustration of another cast p. 175
Giovanni Testori, Marino Marini visto da Giovanni Testori, Milan, 1991, pp. 93-99
Marco Meneguzzo, Marino Marini - Cavalli e Cavalieri, Milan, 1997, no. 95, pp. 162-163
Fondazione Marino Marini (ed.), Marino Marini, Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculptures, Milan, 1998, no. 426, illustration of another cast p. 295

Grey-green patina. Apart from some discolouration to the patina, due to the sculpture having been outdoors, this work is in good condition.
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The experience of World War II left a deep impression on Marino Marini's art, and Guerriero (Warrior) from the mid-1950s reflects the psychological impact of mechanised warfare. The bulbous, Etruscan style of his earlier sculptures is replaced by an industrialised angularity, giving the horseman and his rider the appearance of a battlefield howitzer. The scarred bronze surfaces and aggressive, jutting limbs of this work distort the smooth pastoral vision of his earlier work, recalling Picasso's Guernica as a symbol of humanity barbarised by conflict. The symbolic significance of the Warrior series was quickly grasped by Marini's public, and in 1960 the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg purchased a large version of the subject as a memorial of the horrors of war (fig. 1). However the forms of this work also look forward to a nightmarish vision of the future; as Marini told a critic in the late 1950s, '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' (quoted in Sam Martin, Marino Marini, The Sculpture, New York, 1993, p. 21).   

The mechanisation of the figure of the horse and rider is a bitter parody of the ideals of an earlier generation of Italian artists such as Marinetti; he and his Futurist colleagues believed war was a means of cleansing the human race and dreamt of 'metallization of the human body'. In Marini's work the jagged lines and savage symmetries no longer evoke a mechanised perfection, but instead signify the brutalisation of both man and beast as a result of industrialised slaughter on the battle fields of Europe. The abstraction of form is not an aesthetic purification of the horse and rider but a warped vision of nightmarish realism; as Marini commented, 'the residue of a series of devastations, emerging from such conflicts, could naturally bring about this new realism, but it would be indelibly smeared with the dirt of bitumen. It could become a diabolical realism, like that of a Dante, returned to poke his fingers into people's eyes...' (quoted in ibid., pp. 26-27).