Bucephalus (also titled Alexander, the King of Macedonia) – Manolis Tzobanakis (né en 1943)

In Bucephalus (1973), also known as Alexander, the King of Macedonia, Manolis Tzobanakis crystallizes the explosive encounter between ancient myth and modern form into a single, compact bronze gesture. Although the sculpture stands only forty centimeters high, its presence is anything but diminutive. It radiates monumentality through form, force, and abstraction. In this early masterpiece, the Cretan sculptor offers not a literal figuration of Alexander the Great taming his mythic steed, but a radical interpretation of the episode—one that splinters classical clarity into a Cubist-Futurist whirlwind of movement and tension.
From every angle, the sculpture reveals a startling interplay of mass and void, of sharp thrusts and interlocking surfaces. The horse’s body—its hind legs flung mid-air in a powerful rear, its muscular shoulders bucking forward—is rendered in faceted bronze planes, the musculature abstracted into a storm of geometric volumes. These volumes seem simultaneously to expand and collapse, capturing the animal's resistance in a single frozen instant. The rider, Alexander, is not modeled in anatomical realism; rather, he emerges from the dynamism of form itself: a sweeping arc for the arm, a twisting torque of the torso, a forward-driving stance conveyed not through realism but through rhythm.
The execution is both refined and raw. Tzobanakis leaves expressive tool marks across the bronze’s surface, allowing light to fracture along its ridges and catch in its crevices. There is no attempt at polished finish; instead, the work embraces a primal tactility—one that evokes both the heat of the foundry and the mythic heat of battle. The patina is a darkened bronze, shifting between ochre and burnt umber, suggesting age and gravitas, like a fragment excavated from a modern Troy.
The composition unfolds centrifugally: movement radiates outward from the sculpture’s core, coiling in the rider’s stance and bursting forth in the rearing horse’s limbs. The balance is precarious, yet assured—anchored by the rider’s forward step and the weight of the black marble base. The circular sweep of Alexander’s upraised arm forms a visual echo of the horse’s arched back, fusing the two figures into a single, integrated force.
In terms of lineage, Bucephalus bears witness to Tzobanakis’s study of Italian modernism during his formative years in Florence and Rome. Echoes of Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space resonate here, particularly in the treatment of velocity and fluid geometry. Yet the influence is digested, transformed. Where Boccioni pursued futurist exaltation of speed and technology, Tzobanakis roots his abstraction in psychological and political meaning.
Indeed, created in the shadow of the 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising against the military junta, Bucephalus is not merely an academic homage to a Macedonian hero. It is an allegory of resistance. In this reading, the wild horse represents chaos, violence, authoritarian force—while Alexander, the only one able to tame it, becomes a cipher for the Greek people, the spirit of liberty and unrelenting agency. The sculpture is thus not only a meditation on heroic control over nature, but also a sculptural manifesto of democratic will triumphing over brute power.
The work forms part of a broader sculptural cycle executed between 1972 and 1979, in which Tzobanakis explored the dynamic of horse and rider as an archetypal duality—control and rebellion, harmony and rupture. These compositions, of which Bucephalus is arguably the keystone, helped establish his reputation on the European stage and likely contributed to his Gold Medal at the 1979 Biennale del Bronzetto in Ravenna.
Now held in the National Glyptotheque in Athens (inv. no. ?.4446), Bucephalus occupies a central position in the artist’s early oeuvre. It announces not only a mature sculptural voice emerging from the ruins of classicism, but also the advent of a deeply political, poetic, and formally daring vision that would shape Greek sculpture for decades to come.