Little Horse (1934)

Provenance: Ciano collection, Capri; Rome, private collection

Exhibitions: Carrara, Celebratory Marble Exhibition, 1934.

Bibliography: B. Mascitti, New contributions on the sculptor Arturo Dazzi. The intimist and animalist poetics, in Ricerche di storia dell’arte. Performance in Italy: themes, protagonists and problems, Rome, Carocci Editore, 2014, p. 80, no. 8; Arturo Dazzi 1881-1966, exhibition catalog edited by A. V. Laghi (Rome, Musei di Villa Torlonia, October 2016 – January 2017), Pietrasanta, Franche Tirature, 2016, p. 31; with previous bibliography.

A master of the plastic energy of marble, Arturo Dazzi was a leading interpreter of twentieth-century Italian sculpture between the 1920s and 1940s. A protagonist of a return to a sober and harmonious order, by that time distant from the instances of secessionist linearism that characterized the production of the 1910s, he was able to reinterpret the sculptural tradition of the fifteenth century by synthesizing it in a modern key, through solutions that emphasized the architectural quality of shape and the expressive effect of surfaces and masses.

Little Horse, the author’s emblematic work, represents the highest point of his animalier repertoire and perfectly embodies the aesthetic purity and formal balance of his late 1920s modern classicism. Presented in its wax version for the first time at the 1928 Venice Biennale (fig.1), it was widely celebrated for surpassing “in delicacy, vivacity, and plastic strength all that this sculptor has done in the past”[1], and again, “Arturo Dazzi reaches perhaps the highest degree of his art with the Wax Horse, a skillful truth of life fixed in the crystallization of style”[2].

Many drawings and preparatory sketches, also in sanguine, now preserved in the Dazzi collection in Forte dei Marmi, document the careful gestation of the work, “with a patience of an ancient craftsman”[3]. At the time of the sculptor’s most fertile activity, he worked ardently in Forte dei Marmi and compared himself with friends whom he frequently welcomed, including Carlo Carrà, Cipriano Efisio Oppo and Primo Conti, artists who saw the birth of the Little Horse‘s first ideas. The sculpture was then presented in its bronze casting at the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition, where it won first prize, and then at the Animal in Art Exhibition at the Zoological Garden in Rome in 1930.

These wax and bronze versions were later followed by some marble translations. As suggested by the reconstruction made by Brigida Mascitti[4], the first version in red Verona marble (fig.2 ), exhibited at the time in the Mussolini Gallery of the Capitoline Museums, was acquired by the Municipality of Rome in 1928 and, after being kept in the deposits of the National Gallery of Rome and being restored following the breakage of the four legs, was displayed in the 2010 exhibition Percorsi del Novecento romano at Villa Torlonia, and then finally joined the collection of the Gallery of Modern Art in Via Crispi, where it is permanently exhibited, a solid and iconic sculptural piece of the early italian twentieth century.

The version of the Little Horse presented here, again in red Verona marble, corresponds to the one exhibited in 1934 in the courtyard of the Carrara Academy – where Dazzi was born, studied and where he has taught sculpture since 1929 – for the Celebratory Exhibition of Marble, later becoming part of the prestigious Ciano di Capri collection and finally in a private collection in Rome. The solid but delicate silhouette, the structure with its pure and confident linearism, and the elegant treatment of the surfaces punctuated by the white veins of the red marble represent the essence of Dazzi’s language, in which an intimate naturalism dialogues with the antique. A rough marble pillar attached to the base, signed on the right “ARTURO DAZZI,” supports the animal’s bust in the center, and rests in turn on an original red porphyry base, a feature that distinguishes it from the Little Horse preserved at the GAM in Rome. The innocence of the docile foal with slender legs and sinuous mane have become the true symbol of Arturo Dazzi’s sculpture, which reworked the iconography of the little horse up to the 1960s, in different sizes and materials, testifying to the sculptor’s affection and transport for this significant subject: in the black Colonnata marble version executed for the municipality of Forte dei Marmi in 1941, dismembered at the end of the war[5], and replaced by a similar version executed by the sculptor in 1951, still positioned in Piazza Farini in Carrara. Finally, between 1965 and 1966, he executed a version in white marble now in the Dazzi collection in Forte dei Marmi.

[1] E. Zorzi, L’Arte italiana alla XVI Biennale di Venezia, “Le vie d’Italia,” XXXIV, 1, 1928, p. 626.

[2] R. Calzini, La sedicesima Biennale di Venezia, “Emporium,” LXVIII, 405, 1928, p. 152.

[3] C. Carrà, in “L’Ambrosiano,” April 20, 1931.

[4] B. Mascitti, New Contributions on the Sculptor Arturo Dazzi. The intimist and animalist poetics, in Ricerche di storia dell’arte. Performance in Italy: themes, protagonists and problems, Rome, Carocci Editore, 2014, pp. 72-82.

[5] The 1941 version was later restored by the artist himself and preserved today in the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, of which it is now the symbol.

Elena Lago