The Marino Marini Museum

The inclusion of the Church of Tau has allowed the Marino Marini Museum to enlarge its exhibition areas and route and to present the public with a new museum arrangement and new permanent exhibition. The Church and Convent that originally composed the monumental Tau complex are finally reunited.

 

Church of Tau

Fra Giovanni Guidotti had the Church of Tau built in around the mid 14th century and then donated it to the Canons Regular of St. Anthony Abbot or of Tau, who went by this name because their mantles were decorated with a “T” in blue enamel. The church was deconsecrated and divided into flats when the order was suppressed in 1787. The interior, on a single nave and decorated with frescoes, was divided into three floors. The construction of the ceilings and partition walls, as well as the opening of new windows, damaged the frescoes and produced a great many “lacerations” in the walls. In spite of this, the restoration of the church, started in 1962, has managed to recover much of what is the most important and extremely beautiful cycle of Gothic frescoes in the city, dating from the 14th century. The frescoes, the work of Niccolò di Tommaso and other collaborators from Pistoia, illustrate stories from the Old Testament, the New Testament and the life of St. Anthony Abbot in three superimposed sequences in the lateral fascias. Each of the twelve spandrels forming the roof of the church are instead dedicated to an episode from the Genesis, from the Creation of Heaven and Earth and to the Giants. The detailed iconographic representation is carried out with great clarity and simplicity in order to make the aims behind the work of the Order easy for the congregation to understand. The exterior of the church, visible on three sides, is formed of three rectangular bays, divided by large pointed arches and covered with strongly pronounced ogival cross vaults. The facing in stone is the only example of its kind in the city.

The Church of Tau acts as the setting for a display of several large sketches by Marino Marini, while also preserving the suggestive atmosphere given by the 14th century frescoes decorating the chapel. The monumental sculptures are installed on special bases that have been designed to set off these creations to the full, as well as to take into account the specificity of the space and the light. The Church of Tau promises to be a splendid theatre for the events and manifestations linked to the life of the Museum; this solution will give a greater visibility to this Church, which is a monument of great historical and artistic importance. The Miracle of 1953/54, The Rider of 1956/57, The Great Scream of 1962, The Composition of elements of 1964/65 and A form in an idea of 1964/65, together with seven small sculptures, are on display in the interior of the Church.

 

Convent of Tau

With the inauguration of the Church of Tau, the Marino Marini Museum presents a new display of paintings and sculpture that allows the visitors to discover, after viewing them individually, all the subjects covered by Marino during his lifetime: theequestrian figure, the Pomona, the portrait, the acrobats and personalities from the circus and the theatre.

Without doubt Marino’s best-known subject is the horse and rider. It can be considered a real and proper symbol, a truly original language that the Artist adopted for expressing himself and interpreting reality. However it also tells us that the rider gradually becomes less and less capable of dominating his horse and the animal, whose agitation seems to make it more ferocious, so that it becomes stiffened instead of rearing up. Therefore the horses and riders are transformed into Miracles, lacerated forms or tragic “expressionists”. The Artist attributes titles like Fossils, Screams, Warriors or Compositions of elements to his works once the form of the horse/rider has been reduced to an unconnected and fragmentary whole, when the two figures are more or less unrecognisable and evoke a drama, a tragedy, that has been consumed and only left dramatically lifeless forms.

The female nudes that can be found along the museum route are inspired by Pomona, the Etruscan goddess of fertility, who, for Marino, represented the symbol of a serene and harmonious country world, in other words Mother Nature. The roots of his art in fact delve deeply into classical antiquity and into his Mediterranean and above all Tuscan, or Etruscan soul, in fact he once said: “No, I am not inspired (by Etruscan art), I am Etruscan!…”

For the artist, the festive jugglers who almost seem to dance around the horses represented the characters of a circus who, apart from being the protagonists of a fascinating world, also symbolise man’s obsessive research for an unattainable equilibrium, while the difficult profession of an acrobat is really a metaphor of mankind that is forever hovering between good and evil, life and death …

Carried out in various styles and materials, the fine collection of portraits provides a significant cue for reconstructing the biography of Marino who, from the very first, liked to portray the people who surrounded him. His work was extremely simplified, so that just a few important lines could produce an aesthetic likeness of the personality and character of each particular person, those truly singular features that make all the difference to the creation of a unique work.

 

History

At present the Marino Marini Museum hosts both the Centre of Documentation, inaugurated in the Town Hall of Pistoia on June 23rd 1979, and the Marino Marini Foundation, set up in Pistoia on November 29th 1983 and recognised by a prefectorial decree of August 27th 1985.

Apart from the art works, the Centre’s heritage is a specialised library on Marino’s work, containing monographs, catalogues, art magazines, as well as a complete collection of press cuttings taken from daily papers from 1927 to today. It also includes a bibliographic collection of books on art in general, a photo collection and a slide and video collection, all of them open to the public.

The Marini Foundation was set up with the aim of ensuring the conservation, protection and valorisation of Marino Marini’s work and artistic patrimony, of favouring a wider knowledge about the artist in Italy and abroad through the promotion and support of anthological exhibitions, art books and any other initiatives, especially research and study, that can valorise the artist’s work and memory. The Foundation is endowed with the imposing plaster cast collection, as well as paintings, sculpture and drawings that, as a whole, form the rich patrimony that can be enjoyed by tourists and scholars alike.

It is important to underline that the Centre and the Marino Marini Foundation have always been linked by a close relationship of collaboration. Thanks to its international connections, the Foundation contributes towards promoting the city, today closely linked to Marino’s name, organises exhibitions dedicated to the artist throughout the world and collaborates, from time to time, in the various initiatives organised by the city administration. It is therefore difficult, from a formal point of view, to divide the two institutions that are really more a "single body" from the point of view of organisation and exhibitions.