Centaur

History of the work

At the end of the Kirchenfeld bridge, on the Kunsthalle side, a larger-than-life centaur of artificial stone has been lying since 1918. It was made by Etienne Perincioli. The figure is Chiron, in Greek myth the wise teacher among the centaurs; this is how the work is described on the Perincioli family website, and the photograph on Wikimedia Commons also carries the name.

You see the centaur's reclining horse body, against which a youth leans. Chiron turns towards him, holds his hand and supports his shoulder. The family website points to the coarse-grained material, much used at the time, to the strongly simplified bodies, and to the emphatically large hair, beard and horse's tail. Wikipedia assigns the sculpture to Art Nouveau.

Etienne Perincioli was born on 3 October 1881 in Doccio in Piedmont. He attended the school of applied arts in Varallo, worked as a stucco worker in Montreux from 1899 and continued his training in Paris in 1902–1903. In 1908 he came to Bern for sculptural work on the Casino and the Hotel Bellevue, and he stayed. The artists' lexicon SIKART names architectural sculpture and the restoration of old building sculpture as his main fields. In Bern, for example, the decoration of the Splendid cinema is his. He died on 10 March 1944; his son Marcel also became a sculptor.

The Kirchenfeld bridge was inaugurated in 1883 and links Casinoplatz with Helvetiaplatz. When the centaur was made, the Kunsthalle was being built; it opened on 5 October 1918. According to Wikipedia, 55 centimetres of the original cast-iron bridge railing, otherwise replaced in 1972, survive opposite the Kunsthalle. A few steps further on stands Florian Dombois' 'Der stille Portier' (The Silent Porter).

Researched and summarised by Bärn Kit. Sources: Kultur Stadt Bern, Kunst im öffentlichen Raum (offene Daten) · perincioli.ch: Etienne Perincioli, Kunst am Bau (Kentaur, Kirchenfeldbrücke, 1918) · Wikipedia (de): Etienne Perincioli · SIKART: Etienne Perincioli · Wikipedia (de): Kirchenfeldbrücke · Wikipedia (de): Kunsthalle Bern · Wikimedia Commons: Kunststeinskulptur Kentaur Chiron (Etienne Perincioli 1918)