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Lot Essay
The Marino Marini Foundation has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Marino Marini's Composizione di Elementi is an extraordinary example of his monumental late sculptures which takes the theme of the horse and rider to a compelling finale and demonstrates the way that Marini transformed this timeless, venerable theme to express the tension and discord of the modern era. His first forays into equestrian sculpture, which would become the central and most enduring motif of his oeuvre, date to the second half of the 1930s. These early statues show the rider steady and balanced on the back of the horse, recalling the traditional triumphant stance of the warrior on horseback. In the wake of the Second World War, however, Marini ruptured this classical equilibrium and began to depict the rider as increasingly imperiled on his mount; the monumental solidity that characterized his earlier works is replaced by a sense of climax and crisis.
Between 1960 and 1965, Marini experimented with various arrangements of elements in large mixed media works on paper that barely reveal their subject (figs. 1 and 2) and appear to break down matter to its essence. Only the horse's head to the right of the composition is clearly identifiable and an upright element in the center can be read as a cavaliere. These abstracted "groups of elements" explore the relationship between nature and abstraction. "It is only in appearance," Marini said, "that simplification leads away from nature: it leads back to nature, because it extracts the essence of nature. Dissolved, destroyed forms, overthrown bodies, horses, debris sticking to the ground, bits of flesh, are matter once again, the formless transformed. But these collapsed masses ask for re-establishing; these forms in decay long for revival as solid and whole masses" (quoted in H. Read, P. Waldberg and G. di San Lazzaro, op. cit., p. 291).
In contrast to Marini's earlier equestrian sculptures, which employ the reduced, rounded forms reminiscent of Etruscan statuary that the artist is known to have admired, the works from the 1950s and 1960s are increasingly angular and architectonic, reflecting the growing presence of a brutal, machine-dominated world. Mario de Micheli notes that the destructive energy of the atomic bomb forms a crucial component of Marini's late work: "Marino's reflection on this subject would be transformed into works more and more marked by dismay, but at the same time full of an energy which makes them implicit signs of existence, of the indomitable presence of man." He continues, "It is in this light that we must see the Riders to which he gave palpitating form in the sixties and seventies: the mutilated Riders with their limbs as if charred and broken, impressive bronzes, three to six meters high, where by now, both the horse and rider seem reduced to fossils, as if struck by lightning and turned to stone, with jagged fissures and cutting edge: precipitous and immobile images for eternity" (Marino Marini, exh. cat., European Academy for the Arts and Accademia Italiana, Milan, 1999, pp. 25-26).
Cast using the lost wax process by Fondería d'Arte De Andreis in Milan, another cast of Composizione di Elementi is prominently displayed at the Museo Marino Marini in Florence.
Marino Marini's Composizione di Elementi is an extraordinary example of his monumental late sculptures which takes the theme of the horse and rider to a compelling finale and demonstrates the way that Marini transformed this timeless, venerable theme to express the tension and discord of the modern era. His first forays into equestrian sculpture, which would become the central and most enduring motif of his oeuvre, date to the second half of the 1930s. These early statues show the rider steady and balanced on the back of the horse, recalling the traditional triumphant stance of the warrior on horseback. In the wake of the Second World War, however, Marini ruptured this classical equilibrium and began to depict the rider as increasingly imperiled on his mount; the monumental solidity that characterized his earlier works is replaced by a sense of climax and crisis.
Between 1960 and 1965, Marini experimented with various arrangements of elements in large mixed media works on paper that barely reveal their subject (figs. 1 and 2) and appear to break down matter to its essence. Only the horse's head to the right of the composition is clearly identifiable and an upright element in the center can be read as a cavaliere. These abstracted "groups of elements" explore the relationship between nature and abstraction. "It is only in appearance," Marini said, "that simplification leads away from nature: it leads back to nature, because it extracts the essence of nature. Dissolved, destroyed forms, overthrown bodies, horses, debris sticking to the ground, bits of flesh, are matter once again, the formless transformed. But these collapsed masses ask for re-establishing; these forms in decay long for revival as solid and whole masses" (quoted in H. Read, P. Waldberg and G. di San Lazzaro, op. cit., p. 291).
In contrast to Marini's earlier equestrian sculptures, which employ the reduced, rounded forms reminiscent of Etruscan statuary that the artist is known to have admired, the works from the 1950s and 1960s are increasingly angular and architectonic, reflecting the growing presence of a brutal, machine-dominated world. Mario de Micheli notes that the destructive energy of the atomic bomb forms a crucial component of Marini's late work: "Marino's reflection on this subject would be transformed into works more and more marked by dismay, but at the same time full of an energy which makes them implicit signs of existence, of the indomitable presence of man." He continues, "It is in this light that we must see the Riders to which he gave palpitating form in the sixties and seventies: the mutilated Riders with their limbs as if charred and broken, impressive bronzes, three to six meters high, where by now, both the horse and rider seem reduced to fossils, as if struck by lightning and turned to stone, with jagged fissures and cutting edge: precipitous and immobile images for eternity" (Marino Marini, exh. cat., European Academy for the Arts and Accademia Italiana, Milan, 1999, pp. 25-26).
Cast using the lost wax process by Fondería d'Arte De Andreis in Milan, another cast of Composizione di Elementi is prominently displayed at the Museo Marino Marini in Florence.