LIVING THE DREAM

In Gucci’s Hortus Deliciarum collection for 2022, the fashion house’s identity crystallises through a potent mix of kaleidoscopic gemstones and a kind of brazen effervescence all too clearly recognised as Alessandro Michele’s virtuosic CELINE YAP talks to the creative on his process and the role that high jewellery plays within the Gucci universe

- CELINE YAP

To wander around the hallowed halls of Villa Albani-Torlonia in Rome, being surrounded by its vast collection of art and antiquities numbering in the hundreds—a collection that includes masterpieces even top museums would be grateful to possess— was a privilege that one will remember for as long as time allows. Lauded as the cradle of neoclassicism, this villa has survived 275 years of history under the auspices of Fondazione Torlonia, its sprawling grounds of towering pine woods and oak-lined avenues leading to an exquisite parterre.

Commissioned in 1747 by Cardinal Alessandro Albani, who had an impressive collection of classical art, the villa’s interiors are frescoed in marble. Desiring to stay true to French philosopher René Descartes’s maxim of never leaving any space empty, the cardinal also had it filled to the brim with sculptures, mosaics and stuccoes over floors, walls and ceilings as well as every nook and cranny as far as the eye can see. Among the names involved in its conception and design was the German art historian JJ Winckelmann, whose role in the rise of neoclassicism can never be downplayed.

Villa Albani-Torlonia was more than a place of residence. It was also a cultural venue. As such, it embodied the highest expressions of the antiquarian taste that defined Rome as the ultimate destination of the European custom known as the Grand Tour, especially for generations of art students who came in search of inspiration from the then-newly discovered Greco-Roman ideals. And this inescapable sensory overload, this miasma of devastating beauty, was the frame of mind that Alessandro Michele wanted to relay at Gucci’s presentation of its new Hortus Deliciarum high jewellery collection one bright summer morning.