We must enter into the spirit of the character [for making a portrait]: here the challenge is to place this figure in the human space, to work out wh… - Marino Marini

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.

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.

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.