Vatican Museums

Juggler is a mature reworking of one of the themes that Marino selected and re-elaborated throughout his career. Until the mid-Twenties, the world of the circus and the figures who populate it formed part of his iconographic vocabulary. Symbol of a humanity bereft of certainties and ideally linked to the theme of the Crucifixion, to the extent of being defined as “Juggler-Crucifix” (or the Hanged Man), this polychromatic plaster work was executed by the sculptor in 1946, when he returned to Milan from Switzerland, where he had spent the war years. Still shocked by the conflict, which had also strongly influenced the images he produced during his younger years, with the appearance of his first religious subjects, at this juncture Marino recovers the same suggestions to produce a masterfully simplified figure, again recalling the Passion of Christ.