The Centauricm

He grew up in the very heartland of Italian Renaissance sculpture, near the statue-bedecked city of Florence. He didn't throw rocks at Michelangelos or Donatellos, but for the young Italian sculptor Marino Marini, the past was a prison. "An artist who wants to be modern can't live in a museum city," he says. "With all this great authority around, it was difficult to be me."

In 1928 Marini fled to Paris, incubated his talents with the help of artists like Picasso and Julio Gonzalez for one year, and then chose Milan as his work place when he returned home to become eventually Italy's most important modern sculptor. Yet his works, for all their modernity and energetic eclecticism, look as if they predated Michelangelo by a thousand years (see color pages).

Steaming Courtesans. Now 65 years old, Marini likes to call himself an Etruscan, after those sturdy people who flourished in his native Tuscany before the grandeur of Rome. His figures wear an antique patina. His bronzes are left pitted by their plaster casts or are particolored from carefully ladled-on corrosive dyes; his wooden statuary is daubed with earthy tints, oil paints clinging to the surfaces as in flaking frescoes. Even his lush-thighed Pomonas, named for the ancient Italian goddess of fruit trees, seem like the petrified victims of the last days of Pompeii. But as currently displayed in Rome's 500-year-old Palazzo Venezia, at one time the residence of the ambassador of the proud Venetian Republic, the hefty nudes look like steaming courtesans in the Baths of Caracalla.

For all of his reliance on the past, Marini revived Italian sculpture in a period when it languished after the Rodinesque impressionism of Medardo Rosso and the kineticism of the futurists. Marini loathed the machine at first. He took his subject from the horse and rider, an image common in the Italian cityscape, with Donatello's Gattamelata, Verrocchio's Colleoni and the ancient Roman statue of Marcus Aurelius placed on the Capitoline Hill by Michelangelo. Traditionally, the man on horseback is a symbol of authority, of exultant control, of human power over nature. Marini turned the image from initial triumph to ultimate tragedy.

Victor's Cry. "I saw that there could be another view," says Marini. "My riders and horses would be more dream than reality. They became something that comes down from the sky, but they were sensual." Adds Marini: "I always begin sculpting by painting--afterward the colored image remains in my mind, so then I have to add color to the sculpture." His paintings presage his excursions into solid stuff, explaining in their strong chromaticism Marini's expressionist sculpture. In pursuing his vision, Marini took his equestrians on a strange course through the steeplechase of time. At first, he made his man and horse strain as one being toward a high point of joy. Then, as the years passed, he began portraying man in his canvases and sculptures as tumbling, unseated and falling, and the horse splayed, with neck stretched and hooves sprawled. "My equestrian figures," says Marini of his later work, "are symbols of the anguish I feel when I survey contemporary events. Man has become destructive, acquiring the atomic bomb, becoming fossilized. It is no longer man who commands, but man who has been commanded and has been ruined. Now it is the machine which commands."

If Marini sees man defeated by his own anxieties, he is still in Marini's eyes a warm-blooded and sensual being. "'I can't make a cold thing," Marini confesses. "You can't change blood. From a minestrone of impressions, a whole world, constructed and nourished, emerges. For me the great thing is humanity." Thus, in portraying man as overwhelmed in defeat, Marini by the very act of making art is uttering the cry of the victor. He has called his sculptures "fossils"; they are, in fact, living remnants of human hope.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.