Art card Marino Marini, Giuditta, Verlag A. Egger Cologne

Art postcard reproducing Giuditta as a silver gelatin photograph, a sculpture by Marino Marini dated 1945, issued as number 772 of the "Die Meister" series by Verlag A. Egger in Cologne. The composition shows a seated female nude frontally, with the head slightly raised and the hands resting on the thighs, modelled in the rough surface treatment characteristic of Marini's figurative work from the war years. The card is executed as a genuine photographic print, as stated on the reverse, with sharp tonal transitions and dense dark passages. Unposted, in good condition with a slight crease at the upper left corner and a handwritten price mark in the upper right of the reverse.

Marino Marini, born in Pistoia in 1901 and died in Viareggio in 1980, ranks among the foremost Italian sculptors of the twentieth century. His work developed around a limited number of recurring motifs: the rider and horse, the Pomona as earthly female figure, the dancer, and the juggler. In his deliberately rough surfaces and archaising figuration, Etruscan and early medieval models resonate, reinterpreted within a modern language of fragility and presence. Giuditta, executed in 1945, belongs to the immediate post-war period during which Marini subjected his female figures to a rare intensity, held between classical calm and a nervous charge that absorbs the years of war and devastation. Verlag A. Egger issued the Die Meister series during the nineteen-fifties and sixties as an accessible form of art-historical distribution outside the museum setting.