Horse

This sculpture of cast terracotta painted light blue entered the Cariplo Collection in 1975 with the other works of the Caterina Marcenaro Bequest. While abrasion of the pedestal makes it impossible to decipher the trademark, the work was probably produced together with others by the Fenice factory in Albisola in 1926. The history of its ownership cannot be traced with any certainty due to the lack of documentation prior to 1976. The catalogue raisonné of the artist’s sculptures lists a work in terracotta (in the Basile Collection in 1998) and the bibliography mentions at least two more, one in terracotta at the Galleria La Bussola, Turin, in 1966 and the other in pottery in a private collection. This piece was produced within the framework of Arturo Martini’s work for the show held at the Galleria Pesaro, Milan, in 1927. While it is not actually mentioned in the catalogue, the colouring of the sculptures exhibited is described by Mario Labò as drawn from the blue and white of the old ceramics of Savona. The artist had worked with this material ever since his youth, when he was employed at the Gregorj factory in Treviso. In the period after World War I, during his association with the journal Valori Plastici, in-depth study of Italian 15th-century art, Etruscan sculpture and Roman statues led him to the simplification of elements and composition. In the second half of the 1920s, in contact with Margherita Sarfatti and the Novecento Italiano movement, he began to regard the primitivist purification of forms as a constraint. Horse thus represents the result of painstaking efforts to attain greater expressiveness in sculpture through the use of freer forms.