Marino Marini

Eric Estorick, London
Acquired from the above by the family of the present owner in April 1957

New York, The Contemporaries Gallery, Marino Marini, 1957

New York Herald Tribune Book Review, New York, 7th April 1957, illustrated
Helmut Lederer & Eduard Trier, The Sculpture of Marino Marini, London & Stuttgart, 1961, no. 128, illustration of another cast
Abraham M. Hammacher, Marino Marini. Sculptures, Paintings, Drawings, New York, 1970, illustration of another cast pl. 234
Patrick Waldberg, Herbert Read & Gualtieri di San Lazzaro, Marino Marini, Complete Works, New York, 1970, no. 336, illustration of another cast p. 373
Carlo Pirovano, Marino Marini. Scultore, Milan, 1972, no. 342, illustration of another cast p. 168; pls. 130-132, illustrations of another cast pp. 120-121
Marino Marini, Japan, 1978, no. 161, illustration of another cast
Carlo Pirovano (ed.), Marino Marini - Catalogo del Museo San Pancrazio di Firenze, Milan, 1988, illustration of another cast pl. 160
Giovanni Iovane, Marino Marini, Milan, 1990, p. 95
Marco Meneguzzo, Marino Marini - Cavalli e Cavalieri, Milan, 1997, no. 88, illustration of another cast p. 227
Fondazione Marino Marini (ed.), Marino Marini Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculptures, Milan, 1998, no. 410, illustration of another cast p. 284

Varied patina, hand-chiselled and painted by the artist. This work is in very good original condition.
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The horse and rider subject first emerged in Marini's oeuvre in the 1930s and initially consisted of heroic, classicised visions of the harmonious relationship between man and animal. By the time he came to sculpt the present work, the equestrian subject had become a pessimistic theme, subverting the heroic vision of man's mastery over nature and fate in Classical and Renaissance statues. This dramatic change in sentiment was due to the artist's experience of the human disasters of World War II; Marini was particularly affected by the spectacle of hordes of fleeing refugees in Milan, and in the 1950s combined with a growing sense of apocalyptic angst. When he was later asked to explain his changed outlook, the artist commented that 'developments in the post-war world soon began to disappoint me, and I no longer felt any such faith in the future. On the contrary, I then tried to express, in each of my subsequent equestrian figures, a greater anxiety and a more devastating despair' (quoted in Sam Hunter, Marino Marini, The Sculpture, New York, 1993, p. 23). This mood is expressed in the present work by the rider being borne away by his stead, arms aloft in despair at his inability to control his mount; as the artist himself commented, 'the rider, his strength waning further and further, has lost his dominion over the animal and the disasters he is succumbing to resemble those which lay Sodom and Pompeii low' (quoted in ibid., p. 23).

It was the contrast between the lost pastoral idyll of Marini's youth in Florence and the industrialised present that underpinned this pessimistic view of modernity. For Marini, his youth came to represent an Arcadian period in which man and nature operated in harmony; 'As a child, I focused on these two objects, the man and the horse... there was 'harmony' between them, but eventually the violent world of machines arrived to challenge this unity' (quoted in ibid., p. 22). The brutal, almost skeletal form of the horse in the present work reflects a post-apocalyptic vision of the present, suggesting the dangers of the atomic age. Yet Marini's art is never without a consciousness of history, and these works also allude to the fossilised forms the artist witnessed in Pompeii, linking the present to the last days of that civilisation.   

These morbid ruminations about the future stemmed from Marini's sense of humanity no longer being in control of its destiny and his belief that the individual was at the mercy of larger forces of historical change. Thus the relationship between man and rider came to symbolise humanity's vulnerability to the vagaries of fate, and the loss of control of the steed a metaphor for the individual's inability to control his destiny. Marini situated these doubts in relation to the Italian tradition of humanist thought, commenting: 'My aim is to render palpable the last stage of the dissolution of the myth, the myth of the heroic and victorious individual, the humanist's uomo di virtu' (quoted in ibid., p. 16). The humanist myth that the artist refers to was formulated by Florentine political theorists, who argued that man could master fate, personified as the female goddess Fortuna, through brave and decisive action. In contrast to their medieval predecessors, who saw man as a passive victim of Christian providence, Renaissance thinkers believed in the power of the individual to govern their own fortunes, an idea that was the keystone of the notion of the Renaissance man. It was this heroic and dignified vision of human life that Marini sought to undermine, and helps illuminate his suggestion that his work should be understood not as heroic but tragic in mood.

Other casts of this work are in the Museo Marino Marini in Florence, Miyazaki Prefectural Museum of Art in Japan, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and private collections.