Renzo Mongiardino

Renzo Mongiardino was born in Genoa on 12 May 1916, the second child of Giuseppe, an engineer, successful businessman and patron of the city’s theatres, and Laura Queirolo. He belonged to a wealthy family well integrated in Genoese high society (1). A key phase in his upbringing began in 1928, when the family moved to Villa Saluzzo, a large 18th-century house at Via Albaro 3. During these years, Renzo developed a precocious sensibility for interiors, furnishings and architecture.

Villa Saluzzo was a great source of inspiration, especially for its large and very tall central reception room (2), “which, with its vault, occupied the full height of the building, right up to the roof” and was full of “18th-century stuccos around which leafy branches and flowers climbed”. The room became the throbbing heart of the house, the place where Renzo came to understand “that all the things in our lives take place within the setting around us, and therefore inside a building”.

He remained in Genoa until he had taken his high school diploma in 1935; in November of the same year he moved to Milan to study architecture at the Polytechnic. This brought him into contact with the avant-garde thinking of the Modern Movement: a brief infatuation with Le Corbusier is evident in his very first drawings (3–5).

ii. ARCHITECTURAL STUDIES IN MILAN (1935–1944)

Once he was in Milan, his interest in Le Corbusier gradually faded, making way for what Mongiardino himself would call “a neo-Baroque-Surreal approach”: an initial enthusiasm for Surrealism emerged, singularly combined with some French decorative models. Among the many examples was a chair with a musketeer’s face, a female bust sketched in biro (6–7), and an imaginary “advertising street”, designed together with his painter friend Lila De Nobili – an avenue lined by a succession of different shops, in which the façades of the buildings housing them reveal, through frescoes, stuccos and sculptures, the product on sale inside (8–9).

On 28 November 1941, with the war in full swing, Renzo completed his degree with a thesis project on interior decoration and furnishing, entitled Centro culturale religioso [Religious cultural centre], supervised by Gio Ponti. His degree certificate was issued in April 1942 (10). Thanks to Ponti, in 1944 Mongiardino began to contribute to the magazine Domus, for which he wrote various articles, displaying a literary vocation (11).

iii. THE SUMMONS TO THE MONUMENTS AND FINE ARTS SUPERINTENDENCY OF GENOA (1944–1945)

Despite the devastation of the war, Mongiardino thought Italy’s cities were still alive, and in an article written in 1944, urged architects “close to destroyed things” to act “like doctors in a hospital and not like collectors of mementos”. The article prompted an exchange of letters with Carlo Ceschi, then head of the Monuments and Fine Arts Superintendency of Liguria (12–13). Ceschi wanted to give Mongiardino a guiding role not just in the post-war reconstruction that had to be undertaken but also in reconsidering many of the rash urban planning decisions that were being implemented. Mongiardino returned to Genoa towards the end of 1944, and devoted his energies to conducting a photographic survey of the devastated churches and monuments (14).

In the same period he received his first private commissions, initially for family members: with the design for the apartment of his uncle (on his mother’s side) in Portofino, and the restoration of some rooms in Genoese buildings he realized that this was the path he wanted to pursue. In the course of 1945 he decided to settle permanently in Milan.

iv. THE RETURN TO MILAN (1945–1961)

His first work opportunities arrived thanks to his friendship with the Crespi family, to whom the Mongiardinos had been related since Renzo’s sister, Rosellin, married Tullio Figari, Aldo Crespi’s stepson (15), in Genoa in 1939. Renzo did some preliminary restoration work in the prestigious palace of the Crespi family at Corso Venezia 20, producing, among other things, the apartment furnishings for the young married couple, who lived in the adjacent building (16). In November 1945 he designed, for Carla Marzoli, one of the first cultural centres to open in Milan in the post-war period: the La Bibliofila bookshop at Via Manzoni 21 (17–18).

Many of the inventive ideas employed in those interiors would also appear in the succession of architectural designs that followed, sometimes with furnishings that reflected the taste of the period, like the Chiavari chairs placed along the corridor of Casa Hruska (19), or that anticipated it, such as the wicker living room for the Crespi family at Villa Il Biffo in Merate (26).

The Milanese homes of this period were a repertoire of floors with square black and white marble paving or with small tiles, of fake trompe-l’oeil pilasters, of floral appliques and Louis XVI chairs, of decorative busts placed inside stucco niches, often framed by borders of ornamental paper (25). These solutions were reflected in each of Mongiardino’s works: from the design of the Hobby shop in Corso Matteotti to the only two buildings he constructed in Milan, the one for Anna Bonomi Bolchini, still to be found at Via Donizetti 44, and the one for the Riva family (27–31).

Also presented in this section, finally, is the close friendship between Mongiardino and the painter and set designer Lila De Nobili (32–33). Their artistic union gave rise to a series of creations where the roles were sometimes interchangeable. Among the innumerable examples are the pilasters of Casa Romanengo (34–35), the trompe-l’oeils of Casa Geronazzo (36–38) and the decoration of a small antechamber in Palazzo Giustinian dalle Zogie in Venice (39–40), realized for the Brandolini d’Adda family from 1955 onwards: the same year in which De Nobili produced her legendary sets for Luchino Visconti’s Traviata at La Scala.

v. sET designs and architecture: success (the sixties and seventies)

In 1961 Mongiardino moved to Viale Bianca Maria 45, to the large studio and home where his particular taste for ancient art was emblematically manifested (41–45).

At Covent Garden in 1964, Mongiardino designed the sets for the celebrated production of Tosca directed by Franco Zeffirelli, conducted by Georges Prêtre and marked by one of Maria Callas’s final appearances (49–55). Three years later he conjured up a colourful Caribbean jungle set for Il furioso all’isola di San Domingo [The Madman on the Island of San Domingo] at Gian Carlo Menotti’s Festival of the Two Worlds (56–59); and in the same year, 1967, he made his first foray into cinema, for The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Zeffirelli and starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (60–75). In 1972, Mongiardino worked on two successful shows, again with Menotti and Zeffirelli: for the former he did the set designs for the Traviata directed by Thomas Schippers at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice; for the latter he worked in Milan on Un ballo in maschera [A Masked Ball] (79–87). Dating to 1977, and attesting to his final film project, Liliana Cavani’s Beyond Good and Evil, are two sketches and three photos, in one of which the great costume designer Piero Tosi can be seen (88–93).

Besides his showbiz commitments, Mongiardino continued to design and furnish private spaces. In 1965 he was asked to do the interiors for Lee Radziwill’s home at Buckingham Place in London, as documented by a photograph of Cecil Beaton (94). In 1968 he transformed the exterior (adding two side wings) and interior of Villa Laghi at Venaria Reale for Anna Bonomi Bolchini (99–102). Around the end of the 60s he received many commissions from Italian and international clients, including the villa on the island of Skorpios for Jacqueline Onassis (103–114). Soon after this he did the interiors for Gianni and Marella Agnelli’s Villa Frescot (117).

Standing out among the works in the period 1975–1977 are the New York home of Drue Heinz and the designs for the reception rooms at the Hôtel Lambert in Paris (120–132). He redesigned the layout of the paintings in the collection of Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, then housed in part at Daylesford House in England. The collection featured works by the likes of Orazio Gentileschi and Mattia Preti, and, in the living room, Caravaggio’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria (139–141).

vi. AN AESTHETIC RUNNING THROUGH TIME (THE EIGHTIES)

The 1980s were spent on large-scale projects that gave definitive shape to the aesthetic of Mongiardino, now regarded as an undisputed master of interior architecture.

Between 1979 and 1982 he worked on a commission for Giancarlo Bussei in Turin, creating the interiors of Casa Scaccabarozzi, the bizarre, 19th-century “slice of polenta” designed by Alessandro Antonelli (145–149). This was followed, shortly afterwards, by the houses of Stavros Niarchos and Jaime Ortiz-Patiño in New York (150–167), which stood out for the refined composition of spaces intended to house fine paintings.

With Wideville Castle in Crespières, the home of Jack Setton, the architect revived past ages by reproducing Ravenna mosaics in a bathroom, or real and fake marquetry in the living room-studio, a tribute to the Renaissance models of Fra Giovanni da Verona (168–179). In the Argentario (Tuscany), he conceived the interior of the tower of Elsa Peretti, evoking the Roman ruin creations of Charles-Louis Clérisseau alongside an open fireplace influenced by the models of Villa Della Torre in Fumane deriving from the world of Giulio Romano (180–186). Between 1987 and 1989 Mongiardino worked on many projects far away from the big cities. At Villa La Vagnola in Cetona, he refurbished “a low-ceilinged room” for Giancarlo Giammetti, applying a painted wallpaper to the ceiling with motifs and colours similar to the coffers of the Della Robbias (200–208). But there was also a design based on the decorative elements of a single object: a Sèvres porcelain clock face from the first half of the 19th century inspired a room in Villa La Leopolda in Villefranche-sur-Mer, belonging to the Safra family (213–231).

In the same years Mongiardino reinvented the dining room of a villa in the countryside of Fraore with pictorial excerpts from Pontormo and Tintoretto (232–240), and created what was one of his masterpieces, the imaginary city built in marquetry for the study in the house of the collector Peter Sharp, where the Renaissance architecture of Bramante’s Milan years was reflected in the gothic skyscrapers of New York (242–254).

vii. THE ARCHITECT’S DREAM (1990–1998)

The 90s began with the lively designs for two houses built in Bologna, in particular Villa Seragnoli (255–262). But his largest-scale undertaking was the 1991 design for the interiors of the Miller residence in New York, built at the beginning of the 1910s in the French neo-Renaissance style. One need only look at the row of lively sketches constructed with collages of cuttings on watercolour-painted paper, or the abundant documentary material, ranging from an interior view of the Colbert de Villacerf cabinet to a photograph of 18th-century busts and a study executed on a photocopy of Bertel Thorvaldsen’s frieze at Villa Carlotta, on the shores of Lake Como (263–275).

After completing the American house, Mongiardino turned his attention to restoring a villa at Marmirolo, near Mantua, distinguished by a long front that the architect skilfully modified in the drawing studies (278–279). At the same time, at Casa Sama Ferruzzi in Rome, Mongiardino showed his love for the Lombard Francesco Borromini (280–281).

A key moment in the architect’s final period came in 1996, when he returned to the theatre, designing, together with Emilio Carcano, the sets for Menotti’s Evgenij Onegin at Spoleto (283–296). It was also the year in which Gae Aulenti involved him in the competition to rebuild the Teatro La Fenice of Venice, destroyed by a fire on 29 January. Aulenti wanted to give Mongiardino the task of designing the interior, a project which unfortunately never came to be (297–305).

Alongside these commitments there was his dream of an ideal city, which the elderly Mongiardino pursued for himself, without any clients, combining ideas drawn from science-fiction with recollections of his youthful Surrealism (306–317): would it ever have been possible to realize them – almost an extreme childhood game – with his team of artisans (318)?