Vatican Museums

The Cry series represents a very advanced phase in the formal evolution to which the artist subjects the horse and rider. The theme joined his iconographic repertoire at the beginning of the 1960s, when he began to sketch the image of the unsaddled man on canvas, and he began to explore it three-dimensionally in 1962. Preceded by the Miracles (a monumental example of which, in African stone and dating from 1971, is included in the Collection) and the Warriors, in which the symbiosis between the two is already fractured, the Cries constitute a further step in the process of dismemberment. They represent an intermediate phase leading towards a subsequent decomposition that arrives at fully abstract compositions: geometric reductions at this point devoid of content or memories of their organic origins. The Collection also includes a work in mixed media on paper depicting the same subject, donated by the artist's wife Marina Marini in 1989.