The Large Dancer

The sculpted oeuvre of the Italian artist Marino Marini is essentially an attempt to master Western cultural traditions, and to reinvent them at the same time. In the process Marini reconfirmed two equally traditional and symbolic iconographic motifs: the woman as the symbol of Mother Earth, and the horseman, symbol of virility, strength and speed. Marini’s archetypical female figures represent…

The sculpted oeuvre of the Italian artist Marino Marini is essentially an attempt to master Western cultural traditions, and to reinvent them at the same time. In the process Marini reconfirmed two equally traditional and symbolic iconographic motifs: the woman as the symbol of Mother Earth, and the horseman, symbol of virility, strength and speed. Marini’s archetypical female figures represent Pomona, Roman goddess of fruit trees, orchards and fertility who had her roots in Etruscan mythology. ‘I was born in Tuscany, where the (re)discovery of Etruscan art forms has proved to be of monumental importance in the last 50 years. It is for that reason that my art is so highly indebted to subjects from the past’, according to Marini in 1949. The large dancer looks soft and fleshy, but also quite inelegant and squat at the same time. It is a derived Pomona sculpture, depicted with the same ripeness and roundness, ‘swelling at the hips like a wine jar’, like the Mother Goddess. The ‘earth mother’ was not only portrayed in this specific way in Greek and Roman antiquity, but also in the Gothic period and the Renaissance, and by modern artists, among them Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Aristide Maillol. This sculpture by Marini is characterised above all by the voluminous depiction of a figure in a sort of poetic twilight zone between naturalistic expression and abstraction, between the true-to-life and the mythological, between graceful immobility and motion. The dancer is balancing on her toes with her hands on her back and gazing upwards. In other words, Marini immortalised the momentary: the tensed rest and concentration just before a dance movement. He is depicting the inner movement that precedes physical motion. In that way the heaviness of the classical Pomona is subtly graced with an idea of energy and liveliness. In 1952 Marini himself said: ‘If the surface does not vibrate the idea remains cold. The surface is naturalness, sensitivity. You cannot buy sensitivity, it is a natural quality. Touch a stone and the stone lives. Why? No one can say. It is the heat of the form, it is the sensation, the sensuality. It is the livingness of the form’. It is striking that from 1952 on Marini abandoned the proud status of his other main motif, statues of horsemen. His sculpted horses began to buckle at the knees in the 1950s, and his riders lost their balance. It was often suggested in art criticism that the 50-year-old Marini associated that decay of strength with the end of his own youthfulness. Despite the greater tragedy and drama in the male sculpture, the female form, as in The large dancer, remained a model of serenity and vitality. Five versions of this sculpture were made in 1952-1953. The Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp bought one of them directly from the artist. According to former chief curator Walther Van Beselaere that was the result of ‘an exceptional coincidence’. When the Middelheimpark had the statue on loan from Baroness Lambert, it was ‘covered in bird droppings’ during the exhibition. The owner ‘then demanded to have Marini’s own only remaining “undamaged” version’. The KMSKA cleaned the statue and added it to its collection. Other versions are in the Museo Marino Marini in Florence, the Saarland Museum in Saarbrücken and the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute (MWPAI) in New York.