Marino Marini’s La Promessa is a stunning and monumental composition in which Marini's favorite subject of the horse and rider seems to gallop across the canvas. The horse and rider is an elemental theme in Marini's work, representing the uneasy union of man and nature; the subversion of the equestrian portrait as a heroic myth of the glories of war and the anachronism of the image in the modern age. Marini's exploration of the equestrian subject emphasizes his links with a great tradition dating back to antiquity, from the Horses of San Marco in Venice to the triumphant portrait of Marcus Aurelius in Rome. However, Marini's horses and riders signal a departure from the bombastic and politically motivated equestrian models of his predecessors as they are the embodiment of a new, raw, elemental force. Marini explained: "The nature of the relations that have existed for so long between men and horses... has been greatly changed during the last half century... it can even be said that, for the majority of our contemporaries, the horse has acquired a mythical character. Every artist is in some way a prophet...with Odilon Redon, Picasso and de Chirico, the horse has been transformed into a kind of dream, into a fabulous animal" (quoted in P. Waldberg, H. Read & G. di San Lazzaro, op. cit., p. 491).
Marini's equestrian focus covered virtually all media in which he worked including drawing, printmaking, sculpture and painting. Never one to allow a specific medium to dictate his process, Marini's inventiveness found form in painted plasters such as Horse and Rider executed in the same year as La Promessa (see fig. 1).
In the present work Marini showcases his ability to capture the dynamism of both horse and rider with exceptionally bold color. Franco Russoli writes that, "In Marini's paintings, action and vision (a facial expression, a gesture, a cost.mes , a background) are transformed within the crucible of his creative imagination into pure colors, arabesques, or interlocking lines and planes. The most diverse components of his personality find expression in the variants of a language that is always governed by the metaphysical laws of style. His clear, resonant colors vibrate in lights and shadows that reveal the artist's many-faceted states of mind in terms of pure painting" (F. Russoli, 1964, op. cit., p. 30).
Fascinated by the richness of oil painting and the freedom it gave him, the artist himself commented: "Painting is a vision of color. Painting means entertaining the poetry of fact; and in the process of its making the fact becomes true. In color, I looked for the beginning of each new idea. Whether one should call it painting or drawing, I do not know" (quoted in S. Hunter, Marino Marini, The Sculpture, New York, 1993, p. 37). The joy the artist found in the medium of oil painting is evident in the overlapping layers of pigment, resulting in the rich surface texture and a vibrant atmosphere.
In the present work, the most densely painted areas are those where the figure of horse and rider overlap, mainly in the center of the composition, from which a radiating energy seems to spread centrifugally across the canvas. While Marini derived his technique of fragmented forms from the Cubists, the depiction of a dynamic performance and bodies in motion certainly had its inspiration in the work of the Futurist painters.
