ArtistItalian
Marino Marini
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Marino Marini was born on 27 February 1901 in Pistoia, a Tuscan city with deep roots in medieval sculpture and metalwork. He enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence in 1917, where he studied both painting and sculpture, though it was painting that occupied most of his attention through the early 1920s. His transition to sculpture was gradual rather than abrupt: by 1928 he had produced his first works of real ambition in three dimensions, shaped by his encounter with Etruscan funerary art and by the example of Arturo Martini, the older Italian sculptor who would remain a formative reference.
In 1929 Marini took a teaching post at the Scuola d'Arte di Villa Reale in Monza, succeeding Martini himself in the position. He held this role until 1940, when he moved to the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, where he taught for the remainder of his active career. Teaching gave him stability but never slowed his output. His years in Paris during the late 1920s and 1930s brought him into contact with Picasso, Braque, and the broader field of European modernism, and these encounters widened his sense of what sculpture could do without abandoning the figure.
The horse and rider, which he first approached as a subject around 1936, became the lens through which his entire subsequent development can be read. In the late 1930s, these figures carried themselves with a certain archaic composure, indebted to ancient equestrian monuments but stripped of their triumphalism. After the Second World War - during which Marini was forced to leave Milan for Switzerland - the compositions changed in register. Horses planted their hooves and pulled their heads down; riders threw their arms wide or slid backward, losing balance. The upright dignity of classical equestrian statuary gave way to something precarious and frightened. Marini described these shifts himself in terms of civilizational crisis, the horse and rider becoming a figure for the collapse of the humanist confidence that classical form had previously embodied.
Beyond sculpture, Marini worked extensively as a printmaker throughout his career. His lithographs, etchings, and color prints return to the same subjects as his sculpture - the female nude, the portrait, the acrobat, the horse - but the graphic medium allowed him to work with color and line in ways that sculpture could not. He also painted, and after 1948 his canvases became increasingly abstract and color-forward. The Shakespeare Series of prints (1977) is among the most ambitious of his graphic projects.
Marini received the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1952 and the Feltrinelli Prize from the Accademia dei Lincei in 1954. His work entered major public collections across Europe and the United States. A museum dedicated to his sculpture opened in Florence in the former church of San Pancrazio, and a second Museo Marino Marini exists in Pistoia, his birthplace. He died on 6 August 1980 in Viareggio.
In Auctionist's database, all 20 of Marini's recorded lots have closed, with no currently active listings. His works appear across several Nordic and European houses, including Stockholms Auktionsverk, Bukowskis Stockholm, Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Norway, and Pandolfini in Florence. The majority of lots are catalogued under prints and engravings, consistent with how his graphic work circulates at auction. Top prices in the database include 15,000 EUR for a tempera on paper at Pandolfini, 8,000 EUR for a further equestrian tempera, and approximately 6,667 SEK for a signed lithograph at Stockholms Auktionsverk. His prints and works on paper make up the accessible tier of the market, while original sculptures and paintings command significantly higher sums at major international sales.