Rider

Marino Marini was one of the outstanding Italian sculptors of the twentieth century. This unique bronze horseman was cast in a foundry from a plaster model which Marini completed in 1936. It was made using the lost wax method and the horse and rider were cast separately. Completed in the year of Mussolini's alliance with Hitler, it was the first in a long series of equestrian sculptures which preoccupied the artist for many years. He said he created his horsemen in order to symbolise "the last phase of the decomposition of a myth – that of the heroic and victorious man, of the 'uomo di virtu' of the humanists." Reacting against the self-aggrandizing tendencies of official Fascist art under Mussolini, Marini took a traditional Italian symbol of male power, the equestrian monument, used since Roman times to commemorate historic military conquests and famous generals and emperors, and used it to express the opposite.

Marini's unnamed bareback rider is balanced precariously on his horse to suggest the disquiet of his time. The horse and his young rider have lost their separate identity. Both seem slightly smaller than life-size, the horse is alert but motionless, the rider tensed back as if about to be unseated. Simplified, wide-eyed and round-headed, the rider is stylized and resembles a neo-Etruscan funerary figure. Marini's thought-provoking combination of archaism and realism is both beautiful and unsettling. His dreamlike horseman seems frozen in the moment like one of the sad victims preserved in the lava that buried Pompeii. If you compare this sculpture with the pair of bronze horseman flanking the Gallery's façade it becomes clear that Marini has created a modern anti-hero whose vulnerability is very different to the traditional image of the all-powerful military hero on horseback.