Discover Florence: Marino Marini Museum

When studying art in Florence, constantly surrounded by medieval and Renaissance masterpieces, the risk of forgetting contemporary art is very high, so you have to work a little harder to find it. That's why we want to make your search easier by recommending a little gem of a museum, hidden in the historic center, just steps from Palazzo Strozzi: the Marino Marini Museum.
This museum, dedicated entirely to the Pistoia-born sculptor Marino Marini (1901-1980), houses 183 works, including sculptures, paintings, drawings, and engravings. They are arranged thematically rather than chronologically. For example, on the ground floor are female figures and knights, while the basement houses temporary exhibitions of contemporary art.

The museum is located inside the former church of San Pancrazio, and the interior space perfectly responds to the sculptor's desire to provide his artworks with the right amount of natural lighting, which he considered an important element in interpreting his work.
In the 1980s, architects Bruno Sacchi and Lorenzo Papi transformed this space into a Brutalist-style industrial structure, featuring suspended walkways, reinforced concrete, and immense glass windows that flood the sculptures with natural light and allow them to be viewed from multiple perspectives and angles.
Here, Marino Marini's sculptures do not appear "on display," but rather seem to inhabit the space, which is populated by horses, knights, and women with full, fertile curves—all subjects the sculptor obsessed over.

His Horses and Knights, inspired by the equestrian statue of Henry II in Bamberg Cathedral, are a theme that Marini developed over decades, moving from the harmonious, classicizing forms of the 1930s to the tragic, geometric figures of the postwar period, a metaphor for the vulnerability and anxiety of modern man. Almost abstract riders, portrayed in tension, on the verge of losing their balance.

His female figures, the Pomonas, evoke symbols of fertility with their archaic roundness reminiscent of Etruscan art, yet they are reinterpreted with a thoroughly modern sensibility, almost Cubist in their rendering of volumes, both in painting and sculpture.

Marini didn't limit himself to casting bronze or sculpting plaster, he often painted the surfaces directly.
The use of pigments on his sculptures is another defining stylistic trait of Marini. It harks back to archaic and Etruscan statuary, but not the one we know today, stripped of pigments by time, but the originals, which were instead vibrantly colorful.

Inside the museum, in the Rucellai Chapel, we find an unexpected gem: Leon Battista Alberti's Tempietto del Santo Sepolcro, an absolute masterpiece of Renaissance architecture, made of pure geometry and high chromatic contrast marbles.

Marini reminds us that art is not just academic, but also synthesis. The sculptor took the great Italian figurative tradition, stripped it of what he deemed superfluous, and made it primitive, essential, and direct.

Opening hours: Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, 10:00 am to 7:00 pm.