Il giardino d’artista di Niki de Saint Phalle: caratteri compositivi, valori e forme di conservazione / Niki de Saint Phalle’s Artist’s Garden: Compositional Characteristics, Cultural Values, and Conservation Approaches

Abstract

This article explores the cultural values and conservation challenges associated with twentieth-century artist’s gardens, with particular reference to the Tarot Garden by Niki de Saint Phalle in Tuscany. These sites embody a complex interplay of art, architecture, and landscape, where individual works are deeply embedded within their environmental context, and where nature itself actively contributes to the artistic language, at times as an ordered component shaped through imaginative geometries, at others as a woodland allowed to unfold in a spontaneous and vital equilibrium. A defining feature in the characterization of such artist’s gardens is precisely their dynamic relationship with the nature–landscape dimension, which assumes an active role, becoming an integral part of the artwork. In doing so, these gardens reflect both the sensibility and the cultural revolution that the twentieth century introduced into the very conception of time and space.