Marino Marini

Galerie Gerard Cramer, Geneva
Eric Estorick, London (acquired from the above on August 20, 1957)
Grosvenor Gallery, London
Private Collection, United States

 

 

Marini, sculpture, paintings (exhibition catalogue), Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1958, no. 4, illustration of another cast p. 12

Alberto Busignani, Marino Marini, I Maestri del Novecento, Florence, 1968, no. 18, illustration of another cast

Herbert Read, Patrick Waldberg & Gualtieri di San Lazzaro, Marino Marini, Complete Works, New York, 1970, no. 294, illustration of another cast p. 368

Carlo Pirovano, Marino Marini-Sculture, Milan, 1972, no. 296, illustration of another cast

Marino Marini (exhibition catalogue), National Museum of Art, Tokyo, 1978, no. 55, another cast listed p. 61

A. Zwemmer Ltd. (ed.), Marino Marini, London, 1980, no. 154, illustration of another cast in color (titled Statue of a Knight)

Marino Marini, antologica 1919-1978 (exhibition catalogue), Accademia di Francia a Roma, Villa Medici, Rome, 1991, illustration of another cast in color p. 91

Marco Meneguzzo, Marino Marini, Cavalli e cavalieri, Milan, 1997, no. 72, illustration of another cast p. 223

Marino Marini, Sculture, Pitture e Disegni, (exhibition catalogue), Hakone Open Air Museum; Oita Prefectural Art Hall; Station Gallery, Tokyo & Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, 1997, illustration of another cast pl. 14

Giovanni Carandente, Marino Marini, Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculptures, Milan, 1998, no. 366, illustration of another cast p. 255

Marino Marini, an archaic sculptor of modern art (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery - Alexandros Soutzos Museum, Athens, 2006, no. 22, illustration of another cast in color p. 129

Bronze with mottled gray patina. There are some spots of exposed bronze along the horse's side, but this is not uncommon among Marini's work and was inherent in his process. Over all, this work is in excellent condition.
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Marini's interest in cavalieri derived from the Etruscan and classical Roman sculptures, such as the iconic equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, that he had seen as a young art student in Italy.  His first serious artistic consideration of the theme occurred during the early 1930s, after traveling to Northern Europe where he saw the eleventh century equestrian statue of Emperor Henry II in Bamberg Cathedral.   Marini's admiration for these classical examples, as well as for Degas's sculptures of racehorses, the Italian Futurist's mechanized horses, and Picasso's terrified horse in Guernica, inspired him to explore equestrian themes in his art.   Over the next several decades, Marini's horsemen became increasingly abstract, and the bodies of the horse and rider were simplified to their most elemental components.   By the 1950s, when the present work was created, Marini developed what is largely considered his most powerful representations of this figure.  Reflecting on the development of these sculptures, he wrote: "In the end, my passion for the horse represented a personal research into a kind of visual architecture.  The horse's form is the opposite of man's; the horse is horizontal, man is vertical....However, the concept changed over the years, and at a certain point what had been serene and tranquil became agitated and expressionistic" (quoted in Sam Hunter, Marino Marini, The Sculpture, New York, 1993, p. 78).

In his later years, Marini explained the evolution of the cavaliere in his art, noting how the horse and rider responded to the ever-changing tenor of world events.  "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, whether we think of the beast of burden that the ploughman leads to the drinking trough in a painting by the brothers Le Nain, or of the Percherons ridden by the horse-traders in Rosa Bonheur's famous picture, or again of the stallion that rears as it is spurred by one of the cavalry men paintings by Géricault or Delacroix.  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, ibid., p. 24).