Aligi Sassu - Poseidon and Athena

As is often the case with Aligi Sassu's artistic output, the iconography of this work has a mythological and classicist character. In this case, however, the artist sets aside his favorite subject, the horse, to create a scene featuring two Olympian deities. Thus, in this sculpture, Sassu develops another fundamental interest: the representation of the human body, especially the nude, whose plastic and anatomical qualities he emphasizes.

Even in this sculpture, a static element by definition, we see a different approach than Aligi Sassu's, which often focused on the expression of dynamic and uncontrollable forces. This sculpture, instead, demonstrates the artist's interest in the synthesis of form. The subjects undergo a reduction of their anatomy and physiognomy, and this process is conducted in a rigorously Expressionist manner. Indeed, the synthesis of the subject is conceived to create a curvilinear and sinuous compositional rhythm, tautly vertical, whose primary reference is the Expressionist avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century.

Aligi Sassu, born in Milan in 1912 and died in 2000, was a painter and sculptor. His painting focused primarily on the representation of movement and physical strength, which is why the subject of a man on horseback was always congenial to him. In the late 1970s, he and Bruno Munari drafted the pictorial manifesto "Dynamism and Muscular Reform," which called for a return to anti-naturalistic forms in a dynamic sense. Much of his painting, moreover, is inspired by Delacroix and his struggles.

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