Marino Marini (1901, Pistoia, Italy – 1980, Viareggio, Italy) studied painting and sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence from 1917. He also was an etcher and a lithographer.
Marini succeeded Martini as a professor of sculpture at the Scuola d’Arte di Villa Reale in Monza, near Milan, in 1929, a position he retained until 1940. In 1938, he married Mercedes Pedrazzini. Marini was a professor of sculpture at the Brera Academy in Milan from 1940 until his retirement in 1970. (In 1943, he went into exile in Switzerland, exhibiting in Basel, Bern, and Zurich; in 1946, he settled permanently in Milan.) During the 1920s he worked chiefly as a painter, he produced his first important sculptures about 1928. As a sculptor he consistently worked on two subject matters: female nude, and horse and rider. He owes much to Etruscan and Roman art, but is also influenced by German Gothic sculpture. Marini often chiseled the surface of his sculptures and used corrosive dyes, for instance in the Dancer series of the 1940s and ’50s. He sculpted a number of portraits in bronze and plaster. In his later work Marini displays an increasing tendency toward abstraction. From 1948 he also produced abstract and colourful paintings. He was awarded the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice biennale in 1952 and the Feltrinelli Prize at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome in 1954. There is a museum dedicated to his work in Florence, Museo Marino Marini (in the former church of San Pancrazio).