Cecil Ross Pinsent and the garden ornaments at Villa La Foce, Chianciano Terme, Italy.

Standing in front of the dolphin fountain in the garden near the house at Villa La Foce, Benedetta Origo recalled one of her mother’s letter dated 1929. Writing to a friend, Iris Origo imagined a fountain where, looking from her bedroom window, she saw a hole in a sea of mud. Right there, Cecil Ross Pinsent, English architect and family friend, designed the simple, small fountain we see today, transforming the muddy courtyard in an elegant garden framed by walls and hedges.

Cecil Ross Pinsent (1884-1963) was involved in the works to renovate the villa and the surrounding farm buildings from the very beginning, from 1924, when Iris Cutting (1902-1988) and Antonio Origo (1891-1976) bought this estate in Val d’Orcia, southern Tuscany. They moved in the following year, soon after their marriage, with a project to renovate the neglected buildings and reclaim the surrounding barren land creating better conditions of life for the local people. The garden was created in different stages between 1925 and 1939, a sequence of formal terraces that, from a side of the villa halfway up a steep hill, spread towards the valley.

Pinsent followed every detail of the works, garden ornaments included. Between 1930 and 1939, he designed basins, fountains, vases, seats and tables, simple and clean shapes hand carved by skillful craftsmen in a local limestone, the travertine, appreciated for its roughness and neutral colour.

Travertine vases edge the roof of the limonaia in the entrance courtyard and continue along the external wall that separated the garden from the old road. For the limonaia, the traditional building where citrus pots are stored in winter, Pinsent conceived elegant proportions and large French windows, similar to those of the main villa.
Frail plants are still sheltered there in the coldest months of the year, and, in summer, while the terracotta vases are arranged in rigorous order on marble plinths in the lemon garden, its empty rooms become a cool refuge in front of the swimming pool.

The lemon garden is one of the 'rooms' created along the straight path that connects the small garden with the dolphin fountain near the house to a large terrace overlooking the lower garden and the valley. The rococo style fountain, with the two playful eighteenth century dolphins in the centre, was one of Pinsent's first works, while the lower garden under the terrace one of his last additions. Here, a fountain with three basins of decreasing size, like open flowers, is nested in an artificial grotto, a cool and tall room obtained under the terrace. Opposite to the grotto, separated by box-edge parterres and green lawn, the calm water of a geometrical basin mirrors the top of cypresses and an ample decorated stone seat, topped by the statue of a Caucasian carrying working tools. This statue is paired by that of a Moor with a cornucopia overflowing with grapes and fruit at the top of the hill, surrounded by the wood.

The two mysterious men, with their loads placed on the shoulders and a cloth knotted around the hips, look away in opposite directions. They could be seen as allegories of the seasons, of Nature and Art, or of East and West, but, probably, they were purchased just as beautiful decorative elements, without any particular meaning.










The two statues are catalogued by the Fondazione Cini in Venice as works of Orazio Marinali (1643-1720), an Italian sculptor who worked in Veneto, a region in north-eastern Italy, in the eighteenth century. They were part of the increasing number of antique statues available in the local market at the beginning of the twentieth century, prompted by a renewed interest in formal gardens.

Recent studies, promoted by the Fondazione Cini, explore the history of garden sculptures created in Veneto during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and later moved to other Italian regions or abroad. In particular, a section focuses on the experience of the sophisticated Anglo-American community that lived in Florence in this period, of which Pinsent and the Origos were part. Their gardens interpreted Renaissance style, with its symmetry and perfect proportions, terraces, water, evergreens and stonework, mediating it with more contemporary needs. Statues were valued mainly for their aesthetic qualities, used to create pleasant and curious focal points, often as single elements or in small groups, whose iconography was not important. An idea that seems confirmed by the same Pinsent in an article written for the magazine Il Giardino Fiorito in June 1931: Giardini moderni all'italiana con i fiori che più vi si adattano (Modern Italian Gardens with the Flowers that Best Suit Them), an interesting document to understand his approach to garden design, otherwise documented only by photos and drawings.

In this article, he analyses the structure and composition of Italian gardens without lingering, however, over statues or other decorations, stating that they have to be included in gardens only if 'truly remarkable'. He favours the creation of seats or 'free space' in the different areas of the garden 'to suggest the idea of pause and rest,' but not along the pergola intended
 as 'an outdoor corridor not to be used as pure and simple decoration.'
Pinsent proposes the maquette of the fourteenth-century Tuscan garden presented at the Mostra del Giardino Italiano as the perfect example of a small and simple garden with pergola. This was one of the ten models of gardens made of wood, glass and terracotta (size two metres for three) that, together with photos, paintings, prints and other material, were on display in the Salone dei Cinquecento at Palazzo Vecchio in Florence in 1931 for the first 'Exhibition of the Italian Garden'. Supported by the Fascist regime, this exhibition aimed to draw the attention of common people on this invaluable heritage, and to stimulate a new approach for its study, conservation and restoration by Italian scholars.

By that time, Pinsent, who had left a promising but perhaps less exciting career in London in 1907, was successfully expanding his activity in the surroundings of Florence. He worked for new buildings, alterations to existing villas, drainage and baroque stairs, libraries, wall frescoes and gardens. Different activities that reflected his personal inclinations and interests, but also an architectural education based on the combination of practical skills and traditional knowledge influenced by the words and example of eminent English architects, and supporters of formal gardens, such as Reginald Bloomfield (1856-1942) and Charles Edward Mallows (1864-1915). Pinsent found in Italy the most congenial place to develop his creativity, but, increasingly uncomfortable with the Fascist regime, he left Florence just before the beginning of World War II. He would return in 1943 as an officer in the Monument, Fine Arts, and Archive Commissions and, after the war, annually to visit his old clients and friends, such as Iris and Antonio Origo at Villa La Foce.
 

There are no seats along the winding pergola at Villa La Foce, but stone seats are strategically placed in different areas of the garden. Volutes and curved lines of garden ornaments contrast with the sharp lines of clipped hedges and parterres, while vertical lines echo those of the surrounding cypresses. There is order, symmetry and surprise in the garden, a wood by the boundaries, unexpected views, walls, hedges and flowers, as Pinsent recommended. And, the refreshing sound of water.

 

Photos:
TravelinaGarden, La Foce, September 2013.

Link:
Villa La Foce, Chianciano Terme
 www.lafoce.com

Fondazione Cini, Venezia
http://www.cini.it/en/

A short original video about the models of the Italian gardens presented at the Mostra del Giardino Italiano held in Florence in 1931: A Firenze esposizione dei modelli di giardini italiani, Archivio Storico Luce.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ApnxFdVRZo

Further reading:
Clarke, Ethne. An Infinity of Graces,  W.W. Norton&Company, New York, 2013.

De Vincenti, Monica, Simone Guerriero, Per un Atlante della statuaria veneta da giardino. VI

http://www.cini.it/en/publications/scultura-nei-giardini-delle-ville-venete-il-territorio-vicentino

Fabiani Giannetto, Raffaella. '"Grafting the Edelweiss on Cactus Plants": The 1931 Italian Garden Exhibition and Its Legacy', in Clio in the Italian Garden, Twenty-First–Century Studies in Historical Methods and Theoretical Perspectives, eds Mirka Beneš and Michael G. Lee, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington D.C., 2007.

Origo, Benedetta, Morna Livingston, Laurie Olin, and John Dixon Hunt. La Foce A Garden and Landscape in Tuscany, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2001.

Pinsent, Cecil. 'Giardini moderni all'italiana con i fiori che più vi si adattano', in Il Giardino Fiorito, Società Italiana Amici dei fiori, Firenze, Giugno 1931: 69-73.