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Lot Essay
The Marino Marini Foundation has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
'Since my childhood, I have observed these beings, man and horse, and they were for me a question mark. 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, a world which captures it in a dramatic, though no less lively and vitalizing way’.
(M. Marini in Marino Marini, Pistoia, 1979, pp. 29-30.)
Marini first started his signature subject – the horse and rider – in 1936, after a trip to Germany where he saw the medieval sculptures of knights on horseback at the Bamberg Cathedral. The subject matter of the horse had always appealed to artists, as a thing of beauty itself, but for Marini the theme of ‘Cavallo e cavaliere’ became a vehicle for deeper reflections on the state of the world through the history of the 20th Century.
In works from the early period, the figures are poised, set within calm compositions where the rider generally dominates the animal, in a mythical harmony of man and nature, but as one observes Marini’s sculptures and paintings of this subject from the 1940s, the beast’s neck is often strained, the mouth open and the lines sketched, defining bodies that are often firm and tense.
After the Second World War, the images become more and more anguished, with riders falling to the ground, evoking the Italian peasants fleeing bombardments on frightened horses during the war.
The powerful, sketchier compositions of the 1950s, like the present work, seem to have a direct reference in the organic abstraction that came up and then disappeared in the drawings of the Swiss period (1943-46). Marini’s return to Italy after the war was not a return to his old house and studio in Milan, which were destroyed, but to spacious apartments on the Piazza Mirabello with a large studio on the courtyard. The world opened up again; Marini now fully developed his artistic personality. He now came to a true dialogue with the world. (see: A. M. Hammacher, Marino Marini, New York, 1970, p. 18).
Cavallo e cavaliere, executed in 1956, belongs to this fruitful period; the rider seems to have regained control over his horse, and both are defined by sharp lines, painted in dusky tonalities. The surface is enriched with very thick, worked impasto, and sgraffito, reminiscent of those beautiful, hand-chiselled, rough surfaces that are typical of Marini’s best sculptures.
'Since my childhood, I have observed these beings, man and horse, and they were for me a question mark. 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, a world which captures it in a dramatic, though no less lively and vitalizing way’.
(M. Marini in Marino Marini, Pistoia, 1979, pp. 29-30.)
Marini first started his signature subject – the horse and rider – in 1936, after a trip to Germany where he saw the medieval sculptures of knights on horseback at the Bamberg Cathedral. The subject matter of the horse had always appealed to artists, as a thing of beauty itself, but for Marini the theme of ‘Cavallo e cavaliere’ became a vehicle for deeper reflections on the state of the world through the history of the 20th Century.
In works from the early period, the figures are poised, set within calm compositions where the rider generally dominates the animal, in a mythical harmony of man and nature, but as one observes Marini’s sculptures and paintings of this subject from the 1940s, the beast’s neck is often strained, the mouth open and the lines sketched, defining bodies that are often firm and tense.
After the Second World War, the images become more and more anguished, with riders falling to the ground, evoking the Italian peasants fleeing bombardments on frightened horses during the war.
The powerful, sketchier compositions of the 1950s, like the present work, seem to have a direct reference in the organic abstraction that came up and then disappeared in the drawings of the Swiss period (1943-46). Marini’s return to Italy after the war was not a return to his old house and studio in Milan, which were destroyed, but to spacious apartments on the Piazza Mirabello with a large studio on the courtyard. The world opened up again; Marini now fully developed his artistic personality. He now came to a true dialogue with the world. (see: A. M. Hammacher, Marino Marini, New York, 1970, p. 18).
Cavallo e cavaliere, executed in 1956, belongs to this fruitful period; the rider seems to have regained control over his horse, and both are defined by sharp lines, painted in dusky tonalities. The surface is enriched with very thick, worked impasto, and sgraffito, reminiscent of those beautiful, hand-chiselled, rough surfaces that are typical of Marini’s best sculptures.