Naked on the back of a horse with no saddle, Marini’s rider instead becomes a vulnerable, defenceless figure recognised by critics from the 1960s on as an emblem of an existential crisis of modern mankind. 

The theme of the horse and rider made its appearance in Marino Marini’s sculpture with the work presented at the 1936 Venice Biennale. At the time, harshly judged by critics, the artist was calling into question one of the archetypes of heroic monumental statuary, developing it as a theme of formal investigation¹ while offering at the same time an anti-rhetorical vision that no longer had anything to do with heroic celebration. Naked on the back of a horse with no saddle, Marini’s rider instead becomes a vulnerable, defenceless figure recognised by critics from the 1960s on as an emblem of an existential crisis of modern mankind. Drawing upon a variety of sources that range from archaeology to contemporary art, as shown by the exhibition of 2017-18 in Pistoia and Venice,² the sculptor had developed a sophisticated formal repertoire that was to enjoy great success with the press and the public. The motif was definitively established, above all in the early decades of the post-war period, and indeed became an authentic icon of Marini’s work. The figure is often awkwardly positioned so as to accentuate the precarious nature of his situation on the back of an often motionless animal modelled on a number of ancient Chinese sculptures, with a stout body and slender legs, often in poses at variance with any heroic theme: rigid and immobile with the head and muzzle pointing forward or turning suddenly so as to disorientate the rider. 

The Cavallo e cavaliere (Horse and Rider) of 1948, purchased by Francesco Federico Cerruti before 1993 by intermediation of Pinuccia Sardi, belongs to a set of seven in bronze, one of which is at the Fondazione Marino Marini in Pistoia and the other six in private collections, while the original work in plaster is at the Museo Marino Marini in Florence.³ It fully reflects this dynamic and displays marked similarities with a group of works acutely identified by Enzo Carli in his monographic study of 1950.⁴ 

The motif addressed in the Cerruti sculpture can indeed be seen in a larger work (114 x 124 x 54 cm) formerly in the Jesi Collection,⁵ as first noted by Carli.⁶ In the former, however, the rider wears a pair of breeches held up by braces running across his back, thus following on from the MoMA Cavaliere of 1947, pl. XXXIII,⁷ where we find the same pose but amplified by the way the horse twists its body to look behind, like the rider. Similarities can be seen here with the works of 1947 of the Soby and Jucker Collection,⁸ looking forward to the one of 1949-50⁹ in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the last discussed in Carli’s study. This succession clearly displays a sense of increasing helplessness: from the rider touching his shoulder and the one on a horse that digs its heels in and has no intention of putting itself on show to the arms outstretched in resignation of the Guggenheim bronze. At the same time, as Chiara Fabi points out,¹⁰ Marini’s rider must be seen in relation to the figure of his juggler, which underscores the derivation of the theme from Picasso. In paintings and prints more than sculpture, it is by no means infrequent to find families of jugglers or individual figures coming to grips with horses from the same stable as the bronzes on which scared and sometimes comical riders are perched. Alongside the Gothic and archaeological sources, together with numerous new formal challenges,¹¹ Picasso was established as the primary source during the 1940s. The heads of some of the horses, including the Cerruti steed with its elongated neck and mouth wide open to display a row of teeth, the eyes carved in relief as perforated circular discs, can be seen as an immediate sculptural reference to the horse in Picasso’s Guernica (1937). Described by Gianfranco Contini in 1944 as “a poet of surfaces”,¹² Marini works on rugged material, making the most, also in the handling of plaster, of the rough need for plastic and volumetric synthesis typical of woodcarving. As happens with this technique, the models in plaster for casting and the bronzes themselves bear evident marks and gashes, like wounds that enrich the epidermal chiaroscuro of the form and make its surface wrinkled and luminously dramatic. The idea of cutting into the material is in any case recurrent also in the delineation of the features of the riders, nearly always stereotypes and descendants of an ancient Egyptian model, which sometimes come to resemble their graphic and pictorial counterparts precisely. There are indeed cases, as shown by the Cerruti tempera from the Galleria Gissi in Turin, in which Marini was prepared to develop his formal inventions directly on paper covered in black pigment. On a thick mass of colour applied with rapidity akin to that of certain line drawings and above all of certain engravings (e.g. the etchings and aquatints of the renowned Album no. 1 published by Gualtieri di San Lazzaro) Marini traced not only the slightly generic features but also the major anatomical elements of the figure of the rider unseated by his charger or on the point of yielding to a stronger impetus. This looks forward to the series of Miracoli (Miracles), as though the figure had been exposed to an apparition so dazzling as to make him fall from his horse or unsettle their precarious balance. Horses shy and rear up when faced with an external source that is not stated but often connected with the sphere of popular religious rites, transforming the rider-tumbler into the instrument of a sublime experience of being overwhelmed by a higher being. 

At the same time, however, as Gualtieri di San Lazzaro observes in the introduction to the volume published by XXe Siècle, Marini’s oeuvre as a whole, and particularly the most recent works at the time, constitute one great “prologue to a premonition”. 

Luca Pietro Nicoletti

¹ See C. Fabi, “Cavalli e cavalieri”, in Pistoia-Venice 2017-18, pp. 172-189.

² Pistoia-Venice 2017-18.

³ Pirovano 1988, pp. 122-123, pls. 109-110.

⁴ Carli 1950.

⁵ Marino Marini 1998, p. 220, no. 313.

⁶ Carli 1950, pl. XXV.

⁷ Marino Marini 1998, p. 214, no. 304a.

⁸ Carli 1950, pls. XXXI and XXXII.

⁹ Marino Marini 1998, p. 232, no. 330b.

¹⁰ C. Fabi, “Cavalli e cavalieri” in Pistoia-Venice 2017-18, pp. 172-189.

¹¹ See B. Cinelli, “Nuove sfide formali del secondo dopoguerra”, in Pistoia-Venice 2017-18, pp. 190-206.

¹² G. Contini, “Per Marino Marini”, in Pirovano 1944, p. 10.