Tuscany Treasures

PHOTOGRAPHY | PETTER HEGRE       WORDS | ANDREW KAISER

Michelangelo was drawn to the infinite beauties and subtleties of the nude and found no better setting for this miracle than the Tuscan landscape with its silver-leafed olive groves set among renaissance palaces and mediaeval churches. The colors of Tuscany are muted, potent but restrained, and history itself seems to waft on the air.

Tuscany has inspired the dreams of artists - Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, to name but a few - but inspired, too, the dreams of us all, the eternal history and the ancient landscape drawing us to look inside ourselves and discover our own deeper instincts and emotions.

When Petter Hegre arrived in Tuscany with the Venezuelan model Jennipher, he stayed at the Villa Mangiacane and found himself subconsciously reverting to his traditional photographic roots. Color has given way to monochrome images that capture the texture of the landscape and give it a vitality equal to the model at its heart. As Leonardo da Vinci gave us studies of the perfect man, a body neatly proportioned inside a circle and square, Petter Hegre reveals the female nude against a peerless backdrop. And Hegre could not have chosen a better setting than Villa Mangiacane. Just ten miles from Florence, the villa sits in the midst of 300 acres of olive groves, vineyards and oak woods. Constructed in 1534 for the Machiavelli family with subsidies from Pope Urban VIII, it is thought that Michelangelo participated in the design, although the original project was by Giorgio Vasari The Younger, nephew of the better known Giorgio Vasari, who designed the Uffizi Palace in Florence and the Vasarian Corridor, a renowned painter and art historian, as well as an architect.

With the 16th century frescoes adorning the walls and the bronze sculptures in the gardens by Isaac Kaan, Villa Mangiacane blends into the Tuscan countryside in such a way that it seems as naturally present as the oaks and olives dappling the hills.

The villa today is owned by the South African entrepreneur Glynn Cohen, who has developed a deep appreciation for the history and culture of Tuscany. "Seeing the Duomo's dome framed by the arches of the villa's loggia won me over the first moment I saw it," he said. Since Cohen that first view has taken painstaking efforts to restore the building to its original splendor.

Like the many artists before him, Petter Hegre was inspired by the villa, as well as its magnificent setting. Working in monochrome presents a special challenge, a journey into the very history of photographic art. The absence of color tends to make an image abstract, but also increases the importance of composition, tone and shape. Keeping this in mind, Hegre rejects gimmicks or trickery and asks the audience to seek in this series of photographs their own definition of beauty. The images draw the eye along the lines of the human body as it blends into water, stone and countryside.

Like Hegre, Jennipher immediately fell in love with Tuscany. A former Miss Venezuela finalist, the South American beauty was moved by the landscape and felt in the grounds of Villa Mangiacane that, like Eve, she had found her way back to the primordial gardens of Eden itself. Nudity is the proper form, and the sun, the brilliant sky, the spectacular archi-tecture are the perfect compliments to her heightened sense of being and belonging.

Villa Mangiacane is surrounded by a patchwork of vineyards that produce the renowned Chianti Classico, a wine said to have a complexity of character and a long velvety finish. The 17,000 bottles of wine released by the villa each year are distri-buted across Italy, as well as in the United States, South Africa and Germany.

It was the smell of the grape and the taste of the wine that inspired one of Petter Hegre's more ambitious images featuring the sparkling liquid cascading over Jennipher's body, the supreme combination of pleasures captured in a solitary photograph.

It is rare for a photographer to be so immersed in his surroundings that it will inspire every aspect of his work. When Hegre arrived in Tuscany, this inspiration took hold of his consciousness instantly, as if the land were somehow familiar and he had known the region all his life. This feeling was motivated by the simple beauty of the countryside, the orange sun lighting the hillsides, the twisted dance of the olive trees in silhouette against the sky. He was moved, too, by the architecture, the frescoes mottled in pastel hues by the afternoon light, the spires and towers piercing the sky, the stone arches that seem uncannily to follow the curves of the female form.