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 … - Marino Marini

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.

The Romantic painters were already addicted to a cult of the horse as an aristocratic beast.. ..From Géricault and Constantin Guys [both Romantic French painters] to Degas and Dufy, this cult of the horse found its expression in a new attitude towards sport and military life.. .In Odilon Redon’s visionary renderings of horses and later in those of Picasso and Chirico, we then see the horse become part of the fauna of a world of dreams and myths.

Equestrian statues have always served, through the centuries, a kind of epic purpose. They set out to exalt a triumphant hero, a conqueror like Marcus Aurelius.. .In the past fifty years, this ancient relation between man and beast has been entirely transformed. The horse has been replaced, in its economic and its military functions, by the machine, by the tractor, the automobile or the tank.