“The entire history of humanity and nature can be found in the figure of the horse and rider, whatever the era. It is my way of narrating history.”
—Marino Marini Although perhaps best known as one of the most famous and accomplished Italian sculptors of the 20^th century, Marino Marini worked inventively across multiple disciplines, refining his approach to a carefully focused group of themes through painting, printmaking, and engraving. Of these, the horse and rider motif undoubtably preoccupied the artist more than any other, emerging as a deeply powerful and personal symbol of human existence, and the timeless struggle between primal instinct and civilising forces. Painted between 1952 and 1954 during a particularly triumphant stage of the artist’s career following his award-winning 1952 presentation at La Biennale di Venezia, Il Cavaliere Azzurro (The Blue Rider) is a masterful rendering of this key subject. Combining movement, form, texture, and colour with remarkable verve, Marini masterfully expresses the timelessness of his theme, making this ancient subject feel unmistakably modern.

 

History and the Horse

Transcending specific historical and cultural contexts, visual representations of horses are amongst humanity’s earliest and most foundational expressions of creativity, establishing a tradition that stretches back some 20,000 years to the Prehistoric cave paintings found at Lascaux and encompassing both classical art and modernist avant-garde experiments. A powerful expression of the deeply interwoven history of the human and the horse, these early examples of Palaeolithic art are disarmingly direct in their treatment; their flattened, elongated forms and trembling sense of line endowing them with a remarkable sense of movement recalled not only in the bold colours and rough textures of Il Cavaliere Azzurro (The Blue Rider), but in the Futurist compositions of another important Italian antecedent of Marini’s, Umberto Boccioni. Just as the Lascaux cave paintings seem to privilege the horse as a medium for translating something of the deeper spiritual and sociological structures of Palaeolithic culture, so too does Boccioni deploy the powerful, muscular form of the animal to evoke the unbridled spirit of the modern age in the opening years of the 20^th century. As in Boccioni’s iconic image, under Marini’s treatment here the horse seems to embody wild, uncontained forces, its rider locked in a timeless struggle to contain and harness its power. 

 

Deeply rooted in the artist’s own biography, Marini recalled childhood encounters with the animals as symbolic of a lost idyll, where the harmonious exchanges between horse and rider that he had observed were representative of a greater universal balance between man and nature, increasingly distorted under the conditions of modernity. Identifying proudly with his Etruscan heritage, Marini drew upon these ancient, iconographic sources ‘for the same reason that all modern art has turned back skipping the immediate past and has gone on to invigorate itself in the most genuine expression of a virgin and remote humanity […] an elementarity of art.’ⁱ Privileged across diverse and distinct cultures as envoys of the spirit world, the figure of the horse connects Marini to these deep currents, allowing him to explore the very nature of human spirituality itself. For these more symbolic reasons, horses had also featured prominently in the more mystical paintings associated with the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter, frequently reappearing in Franz Marc’s painting as symbols of rebirth and our connection to the natural world. In its masterful fracturing of form, repeated curvilinear lines, and vivid palette, Il Cavaliere Azzurro (The Blue Rider) draws close compositional comparison to Marc’s Expressionist canvases, both artists using the figure of the horse to explore something fundamental in the human condition itself. 

 

Marini first turned to the horse and rider theme in the 1930s, combining Etruscan iconography with classical examples of heroic equine sculpture. As the devasting events of the Second World War unfolded across the European stage however, Marini’s treatment of the horse and rider theme became wilder and less controlled, the relationship between the two registering his horror at humanity’s capacity for violence and approaching a more apocalyptic vision of our shared fate. There is something of this anxious energy in Il Cavaliere Azzurro (The Blue Rider) as the horses rear their heads and stamp their hooves, their riders braced to bring them under control, and yet the chromatic and compositional boldness of the work strikes a resoundingly optimistic and celebratory note that recalls the jugglers and acrobats that also began to appear in Marini’s work at this time. Indeed, writing in the catalogue for the major 1966 exhibition which included the present work, Giovanni Cardente described it as ‘among the most intense and happiest paintings by the artist, full of dramatic tension.’ⁱⁱ Painted between 1952 and 1954 during a fruitful and productive period for the artist, the work remained in the Marini’s own collection until 1961. Charged with passion, violence, and beauty, Il Cavaliere Azzurro (The Blue Rider) is a strikingly vibrant and dynamic work by one of Italy’s most important 20th century artists, its horses emblematic of the freedom and spiritual transcendence that Marini hoped for humanity.  

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• One of the most important Italian artists of the postwar period, Marino Marini worked across sculpture and painting to experiment with a range of materials and motifs, although his ‘horse and rider’ theme is undoubtably his most iconic. 
• Painted between 1952 and 1954, the present work is highly significant within the artist’s oeuvre, created during a particularly triumphant stage of Marini’s career following his award-winning 1952 presentation at La Biennale di Venezia. 
• Examples of Marini’s work are held in major institutional collections worldwide including the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice; the Marino Marini Museum in Florence, the Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst in Munich, and the Museo dell'ottocento in Milan. 

 

ⁱ Antonio Corpora, survey of La Biennale di Venezia, in Il Sud Attualità, 1948. 
ⁱⁱ Giovanni Cardente, Mostra di Marino Marini, exh. cat., Palazzo Venezia, Rome, 1966, p. 44.