Masks and Faces: Marino Marini's Dialogue with Antiquity in Female Nudes and Portraits

In a long-ignored text, the painter Gabriele Mucchi recalls Marino’s relationship with a fine arts student named Sistina. According to Mucchi, this girl “posed for some versions of the Pomona” and “stayed with Marino until he abandoned her for a girl who oddly resembled her: Mercedes.” This sentence helps to better understand the so-called “portrait” Sistina (c. 1938). This terracotta head, though, seems to have nothing to do with Marini’s several portraits of Mercedes. Instead, it is similar to the faces of some of his female nudes of the late 1930s. Considering both these observations and Mucchi’s testimony, the work cannot be defined as a “portrait” in the strict sense of the word. It is, more likely, a part of a full-length figure, from which it was detached at an unknown date. In other words, Sistina is the model, but she is not portrayed. The Sistina episode leads us to reconsider some differences in the artist’s work on female nudes, on the one hand, and portraits, on the other. Starting from this reflection, the second part of the paper is devoted to Marini’s dialogue with antiquity in the two genres taken into account. Firstly, the text focuses on the sculptor’s attention to some ancient models. In his full-length figures, for example, Marini mainly refers to the seductive bodies and the static faces of Greek art. In particular, the latter seem to be employed as inexpressive “masks” useful for bringing out, by contrast, the vital sensuality of the female nudes. Contrariwise, his portraits seem rather linked to Etruscan, Roman, Egyptian, and Renaissance models, conceived as examples of strong individual characterization. Secondly, the article aims to analyze the surface treatment in the two distinct genres. On the one hand, the scratches on the female nudes provide a new intense humanity and pictorial allure to the plastic construction of volumes. On the other, scraping interventions on the portraits were employed especially to avoid excessive realism and to accomplish an elegant archaeological effect. In both cases, Marino was like an imaginative archaeologist. Through opposite ways, he created his fascinating characters, ancient yet modern.