#Artistic licence segensworth full#

Art is something else: it stops you in your tracks, you sit with it, it enters your thoughts and stays there. “With design, we look, appreciate it a moment, and then go on our way. “ have a life of their own.” We were in a top-floor suite with Mulas’ Duchamp series, having just toured the palazzo’s extraordinary 300sq m terrace, which is shaded by umbrellas and awnings from the Turinese atelier of Guido Toschi in one planted corner glowed a work in neon by Kosuth. “It’s as Gino De Dominicis said: ‘It is not I deciding or declaring where each work belongs it is the art that tells us,’” said Rumma on the day we spent at Palazzo Luce together. Not once did her concentration waver.” The library, with its 1940s Seguso glass table and ceramics by fashion designer-turned-artist Antonio Marras © Lea Anouchinsky A kitchen space © Lea Anouchinsky Everything is both reasoned and felt.” She cites the instalment of 10 vintage gelatin prints of Marcel Duchamp, taken in 1972 by Ugo Mulas, as an example of that rigour: “She spent four solid hours on her feet while she shuffled the sequence. “For Lia, the interactions between each work with the others, and within the environment, have to be flawless. “Nothing in this house is in its place by chance,” Enselmi says. “She wanted to see the palazzo and understand the project, then told me to draft a roster of the artists I saw working within it.” While Enselmi may have steered the wishlist, the de facto artistic direction belongs largely to Rumma. “Lia moves quickly – she put me immediately to the test,” Enselmi says. The art collection is the result of a mentorship of sorts between Enselmi and Rumma, who is credited with helping put names such as Anselm Kiefer and Joseph Kosuth on international collectors’ radar. She knew from day one, for instance, precisely where a spectacular Gio Ponti-signed shelving unit – a one-off in oak and brass, designed in 1946 for the offices of Dulciora in Milan – would live. “To see them all positioned, finding their home here, has been incredible, in that it has been almost exactly as I imagined,” she says. Thomas Ruff and William Kentridge artworks, courtesy of Lia Rumma Gallery Milan/NaplesĮnselmi has long form with 20th-century Italian furniture, having acquired rare and unique pieces extensively both at auction and from private dealers. “Sala di Michelangelo Pistoletto, Vitalità del Negativo, Roma” by Ugo Mulas, courtesy of Lia Rumma Gallery Milan/Naples In the main salon, Thomas Ruff’s “jpeg tj01” C-print, 2007, hangs between two windows, with William Kentridge’s “Head (Man Looking Left)”, 2017, on the right © Lea Anouchinsky.

In one room a 1939 Gio Ponti desk and 1946 shelving unit are juxtaposed with a 1970 print by Italian photographer Ugo Mulas and a 1950s-’60s Franco Albini cane chair © Lea Anouchinsky. Part of Palazzo Luce’s gardens © Lea Anouchinsky

All of it in the context of an exceptional architectural restoration, in which are preserved antique maiolica tiles and fresco detailing, gilded and painted cornices and doors, and a walled garden with views over the city’s Roman amphitheatre. Works by, among others, William Kentridge, Marina Abramović, Vanessa Beecroft and Thomas Ruff dialogue with site-specific installations, ceramics by the fashion designer-turned-artist Antonio Marras and bespoke furniture – including a bar that fills an entire room – created by Martino Gamper. The palazzo’s 1,500sq m are a showcase of Italian and international art and design – a collaboration between Enselmi and Lia Rumma, one of Italy’s few international-powerhouse art dealers, with galleries in Naples and Milan.

It was the light, she says, that did it hence the palace’s rechristening when she acquired it shortly thereafter: Palazzo Luce.įour and a half years of careful ministrations later, it is ready to welcome guests, a singular holiday residence in a historic city that has emerged as a year-round destination in its own right, a sumptuous seven-suite hotel that’s also available for exclusive use.

#Artistic licence segensworth full#

A Milan-based collector of modern and contemporary decorative arts, Enselmi saw the sun pouring through the 3m-tall windows of the palazzo’s first-floor spaces, thought immediately of the warehouse full of 20th-century furniture she had spent the past 15 years amassing – among which are original, historic designs by Ettore Sottsass and Caccia Dominioni – and knew she’d found it all a worthy home. It was a bluebird day in 2016 when Anna Maria Enselmi first laid eyes on the Palazzo dei Conti di Lecce, a sprawling 18th-century jewel with 13th-century foundations, set just behind the Duomo in Puglia’s baroque capital. Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.