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Lot Essay
Cavaliere dramatically and compellingly exemplifies Marino Marini's poetic enquiry into the modern significance of the horse-rider. Throughout the centuries, equestrian statuary and its iconography have embodied power, stood for celebration and commemorated leadership. Marini's riders, however, bear no impressive weapons, their poses are less than heroic and their horses are no magnificent steeds. In Cavaliere, the horse shores up its legs wide open, arching his back in fear as he stretched his muzzle of the side, its mouth tensed in a grimace. The rider falls back, hanging precariously, unable to control or command the animal's behavior. Man and horse appear struggling, nervous and unable to find that unison of elegance, poise and nobility that characterised the equestrian monuments of the past.
The surface of Cavaliere conveys as much tension, struggle and drama as its subject-matter. The horse's skin appears scarred, dented and clotted. A long groove crosses the rider's chest and a red cross marks his martyred body. The casting process did not mark the end of Marini's relationship with his sculptures: once cast, he kept working on them, chiseling, corroding and sometimes painting the bronze, treating the surface as a painter would the canvas. Cavaliere is a remarkable and rare example of such practice. It shows Marini's modern contribution to the techniques of bronze sculpture, testing the expressive potential of the medium.
During the Second World War, after a bomb destroyed his studio, Marini took refuge in Switzerland. When he returned to Milan at the end of the conflict, his horse-riders had lost the plenitude, poise and realism of the early works, which were replaced by a sinewy new expressionistic angularity and tension. Cast in 1953, Cavaliere belongs to Marini's most significant and most dramatic period of production. The anxiety, sense of loss and danger expressed by this work are the poetic translation of Marini's historical perception of the Twentieth Century. 'My horse sculptures are symbols of the anxiety that I feel when I observe my epoch,' he explained. 'The Cavalieri bear inside them the stoic patience of the ancient man who see his world crumbles and yet does not surrender' (see: M. Marini, quoted in M. De Micheli, 'Una scultura fra natura e storia', pp. 13-28, in: Marino Marini, exh. cat., Venice 1983, p. 30).
The surface of Cavaliere conveys as much tension, struggle and drama as its subject-matter. The horse's skin appears scarred, dented and clotted. A long groove crosses the rider's chest and a red cross marks his martyred body. The casting process did not mark the end of Marini's relationship with his sculptures: once cast, he kept working on them, chiseling, corroding and sometimes painting the bronze, treating the surface as a painter would the canvas. Cavaliere is a remarkable and rare example of such practice. It shows Marini's modern contribution to the techniques of bronze sculpture, testing the expressive potential of the medium.
During the Second World War, after a bomb destroyed his studio, Marini took refuge in Switzerland. When he returned to Milan at the end of the conflict, his horse-riders had lost the plenitude, poise and realism of the early works, which were replaced by a sinewy new expressionistic angularity and tension. Cast in 1953, Cavaliere belongs to Marini's most significant and most dramatic period of production. The anxiety, sense of loss and danger expressed by this work are the poetic translation of Marini's historical perception of the Twentieth Century. 'My horse sculptures are symbols of the anxiety that I feel when I observe my epoch,' he explained. 'The Cavalieri bear inside them the stoic patience of the ancient man who see his world crumbles and yet does not surrender' (see: M. Marini, quoted in M. De Micheli, 'Una scultura fra natura e storia', pp. 13-28, in: Marino Marini, exh. cat., Venice 1983, p. 30).