Il giardino dei Tarocchi

Aggiornamento: 18 mag 2020

Pescia Fiorentina (GR), Tuscany

Il Giardino dei Tarocchi is an artistic park located near Pescia Fiorentina, a fraction of Capalbio (GR) in Tuscany, Italy, created by the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle, who has recreated statues inspired by the figures of the major arcana tarot .

“It's a surreal place, when dreams and reality run on the same thin line."

Niki de Saint Phalle begins the construction of the Tarot Garden in 1979, and struck by the artistic ideas of Gaudì in Park Guell and the dreamlike and initiation images of the park of the monsters of Bomarzo, she also decides to create a park that evokes these themes.

In this way the artist started to pour all his perhaps into the construction of the twenty-two imposing figures in steel and concrete covered with glass, mirrors and colored ceramics.

The work lasted for more than seventeen years, in which it was flanked by internationally renowned artists such as Rico Weber, Sepp Imhof, Paul Wiedmer, Dok van Winsen, Pierre Marie and Isabelle Le Jeune, Alan Davie, Marina Karella and especially by her husband Jean Tinguely . The garden was completed in 1996 against an expenditure of about 10 billion lire entirely self-financed by the author, who then opened the garden in 1998 to the public, creating a foundation that could preserve it over time.

As anticipated, the garden is made up of sculptures inspired by the major arcana of the Tarot, so dense with symbolic and esoteric meanings, and these were the final form of an artistic initiatory path that the American author began decades ago. Within the realized figures and their forms we can identify precise references to Matisse, Picasso, Kandinskij and Klee, and the offered path upsets the visitor for his disruptive colors and neobarocche forms. Another merit to be attributed to the artist is that of having inserted his own house in the figure of a woman with enormous breasts, so the combination of Vita and Arte was thus even more closely verified. In fact, having inserted their home in the Empress-Sphinx, Niki de Saint Phalle has fully developed and realized the relationship between art, architecture and design, but also the integration of art and nature, tradition-modernity, something that makes the garden one of the most complete works in the world.

Once you have passed the entrance, you will walk about 200 meters of dirt road to the large central square, which you see in the picture. This square is formed by a basin surmounted by the joined figures of the Pope and the Magician (in the middle, blue color), which are the first major arcana of the Tarots that mark the beginning of the route. The square, created specifically in circular form, to wrap the viewer, gives an immediate impression of restlessness and enchantment, of fascination, of play, immediately immersing the visitor in a dream world. This figure is a clear reminiscence of the Orco di Bomarzo and creates an ideal link with the water games of Villa d'Este. The central wheel, created by Jean Tinguely, is the Wheel of Fortune, the self-propelled mechanical sculpture performed by Jean Tinguely. From this point it is possible to begin a journey, in which Niki de Saint Phalle has indelibly engraved notes of thought, memories, numbers, quotations, drawings, messages of hope and faith. This path begins on the right side, passing under the figure of the Sun, incarnated in the great fire bird, white, red and yellow, with clear remembrances of the American Indians.

Continue until you reach the Tree of Life, formed by a trunk with branches in the shape of a snake, covered like a mural newspaper, inscriptions, graphics and drawings by Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle. The tree of life contains the figure of the Hanged Man, who from the point of view of the tarot indicates an inverted point of view from which to see things.

On the right, a few meters later, the figure of Justice is present, massive and in its sharp contrast of black and white, with the scale resting on the large breasts and the internal space, barred by a gate closed by a huge padlock, occupied by another mechanical mechanism by Jean Tinguely depicting Injustice.

This place is full of importance for the author who created it to penetrate a dimension in which the spatial parameters are lost, also because the fullness of mirrors joined to the circular shapes by an enveloping, disorienting effect and a kaleidoscope of colors and curved shapes continually reflected and shattered.