Igor Mitoraj — Centurione II (1986)

Centurione I and Centurione II — What Distinguishes Them

The numbering of Mitoraj's Centurione editions is not strictly chronological. Centurione II was editioned in 1986; Centurione I appeared thereafter in its small-format version. The distinction is compositional rather than sequential. Centurione II presents the head in a more frontal orientation, the horizontal concealment band positioned higher across the brow and slightly shallower — this exposes the upper forehead and gives the face a more confrontational, upward-gazing quality. Centurione I is more strongly profiled: the head turns fractionally to the side, the band drops lower across the eye sockets, and the overall effect is more introspective, the gaze directed inward rather than outward.

In the large monumental editions, the distinction is even more apparent. The full-scale Centurione I installed at Canary Wharf in London stands approximately two metres in height, the helmet's crest absent, the face half-buried by the horizontal caesura. The monumental Centurione II, cast for public placement in Bamberg and other venues, is a more complete figure — the helmet more fully articulated, the neck and upper chest present. Both translate into the small collector edition at roughly equivalent proportions.

What unites both editions is the central formal conceit of the Roman centurion's helmet: in Mitoraj's treatment, the helmet is largely intact — the crested ridge, the cheek-guards, the neck-protector are all present or implied — but the face the helmet exists to protect is absent, fragmented, or bisected by the horizontal band. The protection has survived its purpose. The helmet is a kind of reliquary, the armour of a body that is no longer there. This logic — that Mitoraj's armoured works are always about what the armour protects against, not about the armour itself — runs through the entire series, from the small-format Centurione II to the monumental Corazza torsos.

Exhibition and Installation History

The Centurione series first came to wide attention through Mitoraj's landmark 1985 exhibition at Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome — one of the most significant solo presentations of his career, staged within the Hadrianic mausoleum that had itself served, across centuries, as fortress, papal residence, and prison. The juxtaposition was not incidental: Mitoraj's fractured Roman warriors placed within a monument that had been continuously repurposed across two millennia made the archaeological metaphor explicit. From that moment, the Centurione works became central to his exhibition programme.

In Pietrasanta — the Tuscan town where Mitoraj maintained his studio from the mid-1980s onward — Centurione bronzes appeared regularly in gallery presentations and in the outdoor display arrangements that characterised the town's cultural life during the summer exhibition season. Pietrasanta's foundries, above all Fonderia Mariani and Del Chiaro, produced the authorised editions, and the works were sold directly from the studio and through affiliated galleries across Italy, France, Germany, and Switzerland.

The relationship between the Centurione series and Mitoraj's Pompeii installations of 2011 is particularly charged. When the Parco Archeologico di Pompei invited Mitoraj to install works among the ruins, the armoured Roman figures — including Centurione variants — were placed in contexts where the bronze figures and the surviving masonry were of roughly comparable age and similar material decay. The installation transformed the small-format collector's work into a larger argument: here were bronze soldiers standing in the ruins of the civilisation that had created them, the art object and its historical setting engaged in a continuous and unresolved dialogue.

Collector Market — Scale, Patina, and Provenance

The small-format Centurione II (1986, edition of 1500 + 30 HC) at approximately 18.5 cm is the most widely encountered Centurione work in the collector market. A larger desk edition exists at approximately 35–40 cm — these are less commonly seen at auction and command significantly stronger prices. Monumental versions in the range of 70 cm to full installation scale were produced in very small numbers and appear rarely; when they do, they attract serious competition among institutional and major private buyers.

The three documented patina variants for the small Centurione II are: the standard dark brown-black, which accounts for the substantial majority of the 1500-cast edition; verde/green oxide, which is less common and slightly more sought by collectors who prefer the surface to read as archaeologically aged rather than freshly foundried; and a gilt finish found on a small number of gallery editions issued through specific authorised dealers. The gilt examples do not command a consistent premium — responses to the gold surface are divided among collectors — but their relative scarcity makes them interesting at auction.

When comparing the Centurione II to other works in the Mitoraj small-format market, it sits in a similar tier to the Tindaro Screpolato small editions and the smaller Eros Bendato bronzes — works that carry the full weight of Mitoraj's iconographic programme in a manageable scale. Condition and provenance remain the primary variables. Examples with Atelier Mitoraj certificate, original Pietrasanta foundry documentation, and the original presentation box represent the strongest end of the market. Worn or repatinated examples without documentation occupy the lower end. The 1500-copy edition is large enough that genuine examples do circulate regularly, and buyers should be alert to the possibility of poor-quality casting replicas, which tend to show inconsistency in the incised signature and imprecision in the relief of the band and helmet detail.

Artistic Context — The Armoured Works

Centurione II belongs to a coherent family of works in which Mitoraj takes Roman military dress as his subject and then systematically removes or damages the body that the dress exists to protect. The Corazza Media is the most directly related: where the Centurione addresses the head and helmet, the Corazza addresses the chest and breastplate — the lorica musculata of Roman general's armour, surviving as a bronze impression of a body that has been removed. The two works form a kind of dispersed classical figure: the helmet here, the breastplate there, the body that once filled both absent from each.

The Angelo Fasciato — the bandaged angel — extends the logic into a different register. Where the Centurione and Corazza use external military armour as their concealing mechanism, the Angelo Fasciato uses bandage and wrapping, the medical and funerary vocabulary rather than the military one. All three works share the underlying theme: the protecting or defining external form has survived; what it protected or defined has not. In the Centurione, this plays out through the Roman military tradition — the centurion as an emblem of Roman imperial authority, the archetype of organised collective power — and what Mitoraj finds in it is not heroism but fragility. The helmet that was made to protect a face no longer contains one.

Mitoraj was explicit about his relationship to Roman antiquity as a source of both form and subject. His years in Pietrasanta — working in the same town that supplied marble to Michelangelo, surrounded by the casting traditions of Tuscan bronze sculpture — gave him daily access to the classical heritage that other European sculptors encountered primarily through museums. The Roman military was a recurring presence in his iconographic vocabulary not as a sign of martial glorification but as a register of civilisational memory: the armour that survives when the empire does not, the helmet that outlasts the soldier, the breastplate that preserves the shape of the body after the body itself has gone.

Centurione — Mitoraj's Iconic Roman Warrior

Centurione is among Mitoraj's most recognisable subjects: a Roman warrior's head and torso, fractured and partially buried as if exhumed after millennia. The monumental version Centurione I stands permanently at Canary Wharf, London, and a second large cast was installed in Bamberg, Germany. Smaller bronze editions (typically 50–70 cm) have appeared regularly at European auction houses and command strong prices. The work distils Mitoraj's core artistic idea — that classical civilisation persists in ruin, simultaneously triumphant and wounded — and is consequently one of the most sought-after subjects among collectors who wish to represent his practice at its most emblematic.