Angel of the City

"Angel of the City" by Marino Marini, Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice, Italy.

One of the world’s most important collections of 20th century art is displayed in the Palazzo Veneiri dei Leoni, overlooking Venice’s Grand Canal. The palazzo was the home of Marguerite (Peggy) Guggenheim and is now the home of the Peggy Guggenhein Collection, a museum, much loved by admirers of abstract art.

Peggy Guggenheim was born in 1898 to great wealth, and when she turned 21, she inherited a small fortune. (Her father, Benjamin Guggenheim, went down with the Titanic in 1912.)  Peggy traveled from New York to Paris and there befriended avant-garde artists in Montmartre and began collecting their works. Many of her purchases were created by artists who later became known as the greatest painters and sculptors of the 20th century.

The most notorious is undoubtedly the “Angel of the City”, a statue of a naked man riding a horse in a state of arousal, which is located at the main entrance in full view of the Grand Canal.

Marino Marini, who completed the statue in 1948, was ordered to use a detachable penis that could be removed to spare the blushes of passing young ladies. However, this detachable penis has now been welded in place in order to prevent its theft.

Sculptor Marino Marini's strident Angel of the City (1948), a youth on horseback equipped with a detachable phallus that is respectfully removed whenever the Patriarch of Venice floats by to bless the city.