The Miracle

Rejecting both the 19th-century naturalistic conception of pictorial and illusionistic surfaces and the mythical transfiguration of cultural relics carried out by the “Novecento”, Marino, already in the girls and horses of the pre-war years, was setting up a rigorous syntax of his own, based on structures consolidated on the module of the closed block, with an imposing and essential architecture. But in the tormented years of the world war (a painful interlude of anguish and of the loss of a balance that had been thought immune to every temporal contingency), the forms stiffen and break up, stretching into an accentuated elliptical movement that might well be called neo-Gothic, like the drama full of pathos that they breathe; this is the moment of this Miracle, of Arcangelo and Arcangela. But very soon structural problems would regain the upper hand, albeit marked by this decisive experience.