Sudpsuez La Foce: Paradise in Tuscany by Katia Lysy
$60.00
Description
Words by Katia Lysy
Prologue by Benedetta Origo
Photographs by Simon Upton and Matteo Carassale
Discover La Foce, the Renaissance villa and classically inspired twentieth-century garden, at the dawn of its hundredth anniversary—once a barren Tuscan estate brought to life through the extraordinary vision and determination of Iris and Antonio Origo.
In 1924, English-born biographer and writer Iris Origo (1902–1988) and her husband, Antonio, purchased La Foce, a sprawling estate centered around a half-ruined fifteenth-century villa with a dream that was as ambitious as it was audacious. Guided by a deep-seated desire to make a difference, the Origos dedicated their lives to transforming an impoverished terrain into a thriving landscape of wheat fields, olive groves, and vineyards. With English architect Cecil Pinsent, they refurbished the house and designed an elegant terraced garden with box hedges, a rose garden, fountains, and a wisteria-covered pergola.
The dramatic story of La Foce—from the taming of the wild valley and personal loss to wartime strife—is told by the Origos’ granddaughter Katia Lysy, with reminiscences by Benedetta Origo, the couple’s elder daughter. The letters and diaries of Iris Origo weave beautifully into a personal narrative of the creation of the property and the people behind it. Newly commissioned photographs by Simon Upton and Matteo Carassale, a foldout annotated view of the property, and a recently discovered cache of unpublished images of the creation of the garden in the 1920s bring to life the rich history of the magnificent property.
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Words by Alexis Kugel
This exhibition, Galerie Kugel’s tenth, continues the tradition of seeking out little-known but fascinating fields in the art world. Renaissance automaton clocks have never been the subject of scientific study, authors of horological reference works devoting at best merely a chapter to them.
These automaton clocks date from 1580 to 1630 and were for the most part created in Augsburg, the main German artistic centre of the time. These wonderful objects combine the arts of sculpture and horology. Rivalling in fantasy and ingenuity, they fascinated the European courts. Today, they can be found in museums holding great princely collections in Vienna, Dresden, Munich. Automaton clocks were also used as diplomatic presents.
The thirty-one automaton clocks presented in this exhibition and book are the largest group ever displayed. While studying them we have made surprising discoveries. For example, the troubling similarities between some of the most extraordinary anonymous clocks displayed here: the Elephant (cat. 3), the large Pacing Lion and his Tamer (cat. 7), the large Seated Lion (cat. 9), and the Chariot of Bacchus (cat. 11), which strongly argue for their having been produced in the same workshop. Among all the clocks published in this book, only one comes from Nuremberg (cat. 21). The chronological presentation that we chose also led us to rethink the conventional dating of certain pieces.
The title “Mechanical Bestiary” is somewhat restrictive, for among the clocks presented here, a quarter represent human figures without animals, and certain pieces possess no mechanical movements. Yet the thirty-one pieces assembled here clearly form a homogeneous and coherent whole. All were created for the same reason: to amuse and delight the collectors of their time.
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