Equestrian statues have always served, through the centuries, a kind o — Marino Marini

"My equestrian statues express the torment caused by the events of this century. the restlessness of my horse increases with each new work, the rider is always more exhausted, he has lost his domination of the beast and the catastrophes to which he succumbs resemble those that destroyed sodom and pompeii. I aspire to make visible the last stage of destruction of a myth, of the myth of heroic and victorious individualism, the humanists man of virtue. my work in the last years doesnt want to be heroic, but tragic."

"Until the end of the fascist era and of the war [World War 2.], I continued to hark back to the sober realism [in his human figure sculptures, then] of the artists of the Etruscan funerary figures, or the sculptors of some Roman portraits, especially the earlier ones. My own way of reacting against the imperialist pathos of official Fascist art continued, until 1944, to consist in identifying my art very consciously with my private life, so that I never allowed myself any form of expression that might seem too blatantly public."

"I am no longer seeking, in my own equestrian figures, to celebrate the triumph of any victorious hero. On the contrary, I seek to commemorate in them something tragic – in fact, a kind of Twilight of Man, a defeat rather than a victory. If you look back on all my equestrian figures of the past twelve years [between 1946 – 1958] you will notice that the rider is each time less in control of his mount, and that the latter is each time more wild in its terror, but frozen stiff, rather than reared or running away. All this is because I feel that we are on the eve of the end of a whole world."

"I had been born in an Earthly Paradise [in Tuscany, Italy] from which we all have expelled. Not so long ago a sculptor could still be content with a search for full, sensual and vigorous forms. But in the past fifteen years [1943 – 1958], nearly all our new sculpture has tended to create forms that are disintegrating."

"Why should I and other sculptors.. .I know Marino Marini feels it – find this work [the Rondanini Pietà of Michelangelo] one of the most moving and greatest works we know of when its a work which has such disunity in it?"

"There is an intimate relationship between my pictorial [2-dimensional] and my sculptural work. I would never begin on a sculpture without first gaining an idea of the colour.. .My mind is captivated by this task until I start to put down the colour on paper and imagine that this colour will become a drawing. And then, suddenly, the drawing begins to acquire shape, the shape, and this shape becomes the real shape."