Marino Marini spent most of his career on a single image: a horse with a figure on its back. Early versions are calm and upright. Later ones lean, stretch and finally topple, with the rider thrown back and the horse’s legs locked rigid. Seen in sequence, the series works like a set of animation keyframes, and that is what makes him useful to designers. He shows how far you can push a mark, a logo or an illustration system by changing angle, weight and surface while keeping the core silhouette.
Marini died in 1980, so his sculptures, paintings and prints are still protected by copyright. The Met, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art hold his work but do not flag any of it as public domain or CC0, so this guide describes it in text only; license any reproduction. For historic images cleared for reuse, browse the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Marino Marini?
Britannica gives his birth as 27 February 1901 in Pistoia, Tuscany, and his death as 6 August 1980 in Viareggio; the Met’s collection record gives the same towns and years, and the Fondazione Marino Marini in Pistoia agrees. He enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence in 1917, according to the UniCredit Art Collection biography and the Estorick Collection.
In 1940 he became professor of sculpture at the Brera Academy in Milan, the date Britannica gives (some gallery biographies say 1941), and Britannica records that he held the post until 1970. During the Second World War he moved to Switzerland in 1943, settling in Ticino; the Fondazione Marino Marini dates his return to Milan to spring 1946, while other accounts say 1947.
A dated career outline
- Mid-1930s onward, Pomona. A long series of full, rounded standing female figures named after the Roman goddess of orchards. The Estorick Collection dates the start of the series to the mid-1930s; Art UK lists a bronze Pomona in the Estorick’s London collection.
- 1946, Juggler. A tall, narrow bronze figure, 184.2 cm high, in the Art Institute of Chicago.
- c. 1947, Horse and Rider. A bronze in the Art Institute of Chicago, 96.5 cm high.
- 1948, The Angel of the City. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection dates the work 1948 and its bronze cast 1949; Peggy Guggenheim bought the plaster and placed the bronze at the water gate of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal, where it still stands. The rider leans back with both arms flung wide.
- 1949, Samuel Barber. A bronze portrait head of the American composer, now in the Met, bequeathed by Barber himself.
- 1951–53, colour lithographs. The Art Institute of Chicago holds Stunt Rider (1951), The Red Knight (1953) and Juggler and Two Horses, Blue, Yellow and Black (1953); the Cleveland Museum of Art holds Horse (1953).
- 1952, Venice Biennale. The Fondazione Marino Marini records that he won the grand prize for sculpture at the 1952 Biennale, where he had a solo room; other sources describe it as the first prize for sculpture.
- 1950s–60s, Miracle. The Estorick Collection describes this late series, in which riders are thrown from rearing horses they can no longer control; the Estorick holds a Study for The Miracle dated 1953–54, and Cleveland holds the lithograph Miracle (1965).
What to look at in a Marino Marini horse and rider
The tilt is the message. In the late 1940s horse-and-rider bronzes, the horse stands four-square, legs like pillars, while the rider leans back at a sharp angle. The whole emotional reading comes from that one diagonal against the vertical legs. Rotate the rider a few degrees further and the mood shifts from pride to alarm.
Mass reduced to blocks. Marini’s horses have barrel bodies, short stiff necks and almost no anatomical detail. The rider is a simple trunk with a small head and short arms. That reduction makes the silhouette readable from a distance, which is why The Angel of the City works at the edge of a canal, seen from passing boats.
Open arms and horizontals. In The Angel of the City the rider’s outstretched arms form a horizontal bar across the composition, echoing the horse’s neck.
A scratched, worked surface. Many of his bronzes have a worked, uneven surface, with scored lines and areas of patina that vary in tone. Up close, the simple mass turns out to be covered in marks, which keeps the forms from feeling cold.
Prints, paint and colour
Britannica notes that he returned to painting in 1948, in a colourful and increasingly abstract style, and printmaking became a major outlet in the following decade. The lithographs in Chicago and Cleveland are useful for graphic designers because they translate the sculpture into flat shape. In The Red Knight and Juggler and Two Horses, Blue, Yellow and Black, horse and rider are blocked in with a few broad areas of colour, then pulled together with fast black lines that suggest a leg, a mane or a face.
The prints show a working method worth copying: start with the silhouette as a solid shape, add a limited palette of saturated colours that do not need to match the subject, then draw over the top with a loose contour that does not quite align with the fills. The slight mis-registration between line and colour gives the image energy. Later suites, such as the colour etchings in Ideas and Space (1963) at the Art Institute of Chicago, push the forms closer to abstraction.
Technique: from plaster to bronze, and back to the hand
Marini typically modelled in plaster and then had works cast in bronze, as the Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s account of The Angel of the City shows: plaster in 1948, bronze in 1949. His interest in early Italian art is well documented: the Estorick Collection connects his figures to ancient Italian sculpture, especially the Etruscan art he saw in Florence.
His portrait heads, such as the Met’s Samuel Barber, use the same approach on a smaller scale: broad planes, a slightly roughened skin and a strong, simplified profile rather than a polished likeness.
Marino Marini and modern sculpture
Marini worked in the same decades as Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti, and the comparison is useful. Moore opens his figures with holes and landscape-like curves; Giacometti thins them almost to a line. Marini goes the other way, keeping the mass solid and putting all the tension into the angle between rider and horse. Jacques Lipchitz and his heavier, curving bronzes make another useful point of comparison. For the print side of his practice, our guide to lithography explains the process he used for the colour sheets.
How designers can borrow from Marino Marini
- Build a motif system, not a single image. Pick one simple silhouette and design a series of states for it: upright, leaning, falling. It works for brand illustration sets, icon families and animated logos.
- Let angle carry emotion. Before adding detail, test how a figure or mark reads at 0, 10 and 25 degrees of tilt. A small rotation often says more than a new element.
- Separate fill and line. Lay down flat blocks of colour, then draw the contour on a separate layer with a looser hand. Let the two drift slightly out of register.
- Keep the surface alive. Add texture or scratched marks only inside simple shapes, so the silhouette stays clean at small sizes while the detail rewards a closer look.
Where to see his work
After his death the Fondazione Marino Marini was set up in Pistoia and the Museo Marino Marini opened in Florence, in the former church of San Pancrazio, as Sotheby’s and the Fondazione both note. The Angel of the City stands at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and the Estorick Collection in London has sculpture and drawings. In the US, the Art Institute of Chicago holds bronzes, drawings and prints, the Met holds the Samuel Barber portrait, and the Cleveland Museum of Art holds lithographs.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Marino Marini?
Marino Marini (1901–1980) was an Italian sculptor, painter and printmaker, born in Pistoia and based for most of his career in Milan, where he taught sculpture at the Brera Academy. He is known for horse-and-rider sculptures, the Pomona figures and portrait heads.
What is The Angel of the City?
A bronze horse and rider dated 1948 and cast in 1949, bought by Peggy Guggenheim and installed at the canal entrance of her Venice palazzo, now the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. The rider leans back with arms spread wide.
Is Marino Marini’s work public domain?
No. He died in 1980, and the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art do not flag any of his works as public domain or CC0. Treat his sculptures, paintings and prints as protected and license them for reproduction.
What can designers learn from Marino Marini?
How to build a visual system from one repeated silhouette, how a change of angle can shift the mood of an image, and how flat colour plus loose line can turn a three-dimensional form into strong print graphics.
