This catalogue examines the sculpture of Marino Marini (1901-1980) with the methods of art historical enquiry for the first time.

The myths that have gathered around Marini (the artist-potter, the reborn Etruscan, the Tuscan primitive, modern despite himself) have distorted our reading of his work and segregated him from history. Marini is here returned to the context of twentieth-century European sculpture, against which he continually measured himself. His work is also viewed in the light of the ancient sculpture which was for him a constant object of meditation and source of inspiration.

Three essays evaluate major historiographic questions that surround Marini: his place in Italy’s art system in the 1930s and 1940s; the critical art writing that shaped the Marini myth in his lifetime; his archaeological sources. The second part of the catalogue, in eight chapters, looks at specific aspects and periods, from the early work to the 1960s, tracing the development of style and content in Marini’s sculpture. The catalogue closes with the first exhaustive compilation of Marini’s own statements and interviews on the poetics of his work, from 1935 to 1973.