Exhibitions: The Centauricm

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He grew up in the very heartland of Italian Renaissance sculpture, near the statue-bedecked city of Florence. He didn't throw rocks at Michelangelos or Donatellos, but for the young Italian sculptor Marino Marini, the past was a prison. "An artist who wants to be modern can't live in a museum city," he says. "With all this great authority around, it was difficult to be me."

In 1928 Marini fled to Paris, incubated his talents with the help of artists like Picasso and Julio González for one year, and then chose Milan as his work place when he returned home to become eventually Italy's most important modern sculptor. Yet his works, for all their modernity and energetic eclecticism, look as if they predated Michelangelo by a thousand years (see color pages).

Steaming Courtesans. Now 65 years old, Marini likes to call himself an Etruscan, after those sturdy people who flourished in his native Tuscany before the grandeur of Rome. His figures wear an antique patina. His bronzes are left pitted by their plaster casts or are particolored from carefully ladled-on corrosive dyes; his wooden statuary is daubed with earthy tints, oil paints clinging to the surfaces as in flaking frescoes. Even his lush-thighed Pomonas, named for the ancient Italian goddess of fruit trees, seem like the petrified victims of the last days of Pompeii. But as currently displayed in Rome's 500-year-old Palazzo Venezia, at one time the residence of the ambassador of the proud Venetian Republic, the hefty nudes look like steaming courtesans in the Baths of Caracalla.

For all of his reliance on the past, Marini revived Italian sculpture in a period when it languished after the Rodinesque impressionism of Medardo Rosso and the kineticism of the futurists. Marini loathed the machine at first. He took his subject from the horse and rider, an image common in the Italian cityscape, with Donatello's Gattamelata, Verrocchio's Colleoni and the ancient Roman statue of Marcus Aurelius placed on the Capitoline Hill by Michelangelo. Traditionally, the man on horseback is a symbol of authority, of exultant control, of human power over nature. Marini turned the image from initial triumph to ultimate tragedy.