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Artist or Maker: Marino Marini (1901-1980)
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Notes: Filled with the tension and anguish of Marini's reflections on the aftermath of the Second World War, Piccolo cavallo is also a powerful example of the artist's adherence to the classical tradition in Italian art, reaching back to the Renaissance and to antiquity. In a time of mechanized warfare, and man's increasing estrangement from nature, Marino Marini used the horse to symbolize expressionistic vulnerability as well as hope in the continued possibility of depicting a kind of classical balance between dynamism and stasis. As Giovanni Carandente has observed, ''The object of [Marini's] experimentation remained the salvage of form which was neither idyllic nor sentimental, but expressed in a language that goes beyond time, a form rooted in the millennial, universal idea of truth implicit to human consciousness." (in op. cit., p. 10.)
The horse in the present sculpture twists its neck backward over its haunches. Its legs are splayed widely, and reach to the four corners of the sculpture's base, as if it has recently come to a stop. It is rare that a horse by Marini turns to the rear as it does here, rather than looking straight up or forward. In this composition, the horse's body forms an almost pyramidal shape that circumscribes the negative space between the horse's legs as part of the sculpture itself. The body's dramatic torsion suggests the massing of energy, yet also the possibility that the animal might be in danger of losing the corner of earth it currently dominates so completely. The sculpture implies, rather than demonstrates, a narrative; perhaps the horse has turned so violently because it has been wounded, or perceives an imminent danger. Marini's expressive treatment of the bronze surface itself contributes to the drama of the sculpture.
Piccolo cavallo relates to a theme that Marini first approached in the late 1930s: the relationship of man to nature. A series of sculptures of horses embodied Marini's interest in the primitive, mythic and elemental. Long influenced by Archaic Greek and Etruscan sculpture in Italy, and fascinated by the heroic forms he saw there, Marini in the late 1940s began the works that would guarantee his lasting fame. Reacting to what he saw as mankind's essential vulnerability in the face of the world war, he emboldened his equestrian sculptures with a contemporary urgency, and the expressiveness of his forms became more pronounced. After 1947, his figures began to be less rounded than their predecessors from the 1930s, and their increasingly angular forms became more abstracted. In the examples where a horse is paired with a rider, the horsemen became increasingly insecure, or even imperiled astride their mounts. Such works seem to suggest the moments just before the felling of horse and soldier depicted in Picasso's Guernica, one of the great influences on Marini's imagery (fig. 1).
In Piccolo cavallo, the riderless animal assumes full symbolic responsibility for conveying humanity's fragility in wartime, as well as itself symbolizing natural and elemental strength. According to Marini, the 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 was, he observed, ''rapidly becoming a kind of lost myth." Accordingly he felt that his own work ''followed a general trend in its evolution, from representing a horse as part of the fauna of the objective world to suggesting a visionary monster arisen from a subjective bestiary." (quoted in S. Hunter, Marino Marini: The Sculpture, New York, 1993. pp. 24 and 25)
(fig. 1) Pablo Picasso, Guernica (detail), 1937. National Museum Centro de Arte Reina SofÃa, Madrid. Copyright 2007 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York BARCODE 25238730
