The Drama: Four Acts exhibition project adds a new chapter with the public opening of No Heroes, an exhibit dedicated to Marino Marini at Forte di Belvedere.

On the first floor of the Palazzina, a dialogue between Marino Marini and Paolo Canevari addresses the theme of history, exploring the deepest essence of the human condition, conflict, and the crisis of humanist civilization. Marini’s works—characterized by extraordinary expressive power and a constant quest for identity centered on the human figure and its archetypes—engage with the contemporary language of Paolo Canevari, who employs industrial and reclaimed materials to evoke historical, social, and political tensions.

Central to Marini’s work is the renowned theme of the horse and rider, which the artist approaches as a metaphor for the human condition and the relationship between the individual, nature, and history. While the figures in his 1930s works retain a monumental balance and classical poise, the experience of the Second World War—with its mass extermination and the threat of nuclear apocalypse—profoundly transformed his artistic language.
Bodies grew rigid, forms became angular, and the horse reared up, unseating the rider, as seen in the Miracoli (Miracles) series. This loss of balance thus became an image of the modern human crisis, overwhelmed by a violence that could no longer be controlled.

The Horse and Rider embody a critique of the new technological and industrial society—oppressive, dehumanizing, and responsible for social conflicts and fratricidal destruction. Marino channels the tragic sense of history into his final, dramatic sculptures—such as the Cries and Miracles —featuring figures that are shattered, distorted, screaming, and collapsed.
A supreme example of spare modeling is the figure of the Prisoner, representing defenseless, defeated humanity—a sacrificial victim of history and the evil wrought by progress and the lethal ambitions of human power.

The exhibition also features a Bather, whose crouching posture recalls Michelangelo’s famous Adolescent. In this figure by Marino Marini, a sense of inward-looking melancholy, despondency, and dejection seems to prevail. The last of the five sculptures most representative of Marino Marini’s world is the Dancer, displayed in a room featuring Canevari’s sculptures made from tire casings. Like the Tightrope Walker, the dancer is a circus figure—a realm of acrobatic feats, dazzling choreography, and sardonic performances that deeply fascinated Marino. The figures of the acrobat and the dancer emerge in this era of modern dehumanization as a vital, hopeful alternative. They belong to a primordial age of humanity when imagination and creativity, play and irony, dominated the realms of art and the sacred—figures to which the artist turns to counter and exorcise the evil that corrodes humanism, both past and future.