(Volos, Greece 1888–1978 Rome)
Cavaliere con berretto frigio, c. 1937, signed g. de chirico, tempera on thick paper, 23 x 32 cm, framed

Photo certificate by Claudio Bruni Sakraischik, Rome, 31 March 1988, archive no. 5/88/CB

Provenance:
Private Collection, Italy
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Cherasco, I fratelli de Chirico. Giorgio e Alberto Savinio, Palazzo Salmatoris, 9–19 December 2004, exh. cat. pp. 78–79 with ill. (label on the reverse)

Photo certificate by Claudio Bruni Sakraischik, Rome, 31 March 1988, archive no. 5/88/CB

Provenance:
Private Collection, Italy
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Cherasco, I fratelli de Chirico. Giorgio e Alberto Savinio, Palazzo Salmatoris, 9–19 December 2004, exh. cat. pp. 78–79 with ill. (label on the reverse)

“Why always horses and horsemen? It is my way of changing history. Equestrian images are the medium I need to give human passion a form. I can’t explain better than this, it is a higher intuition.”

From the Rampin Horseman to Marcus Aurelius, from Gattamelata to Bartolomeo Colleoni, from David’s Napoleon astride a rearing horse to dynamic-futuristic steeds, the history of art is marked by an inexhaustible series of horses and riders. This iconography is of major importance in the modern as well as the classical era, both in terms of its commemorative function as well as its propaganda value. Not so for Marino Marini (Pistoia, 1901 – Viareggio, 1980) who, struck by the view of the equestrian statue of Henry II in Bamberg Cathedral, conceives of the rider as a tragic figure, an archetype of reality, a structure open to every development.

[…] Anti-classical and primordial, Marini’s interpretation of the rider – which is the emblem of his work, defining and characterising as it does his whole artistic career and various phases – draws on Etruscan sculpture for the iconographic rendition of the subject in an expressionist style. Whilst before World War II formal purity and classicism lend themselves to a naturalist interpretation, his subsequent works are characterised by volumes of broken lines and an ever-rising tension between horse and rider. Deformation, simplification, and synthesis are now the main features that evoke the drama and precarity of an existence ravaged by pain.

By discarding every traditional compositional structure, the artist creates an image of the rider who gradually becomes one with the horse, losing his power when the contrast is lost. Thus, at the end of the 1940s, Marini’s rider becomes more rigid, unable to dominate his mount, to the point of spreading out his arms in a desperate gesture of surrender, and in the 1950s assumes an unprecedented pathos. It symbolises the inevitable fall of humanity before its inauspicious destiny: eventually, he topples from the horse as it falls to the ground. This is the moment of human tragedy. A tragedy capable of bending man, who refuses to surrender, to the point of decomposing him, transforming into a lifeless fossil that which once upon a time represented the myth of man, heroic and victorious, the virtuous man of the humanists.

from: Roberta Vanali, Cavalli e cavalieri che fecero l’impresa, published in “Artribune”, 22 January 2013 on the occasion of the exhibition “Marino Marini. Cavalli e Cavalieri” held at Museo Man, Nuoro, 14 December 2012 – 24 February 2013