La piazza di Settignano, Telemaco Signorini, 1880

Location of the province of Florence

Settignano is a picturesque frazione ranged on a hillside northeast of Florence, Italy, with spectacular views that have attracted American expatriates for generations. The little borgo of Settignano carries a familiar name for having produced three sculptors of the Florentine Renaissance, Desiderio da Settignano and the Gamberini brothers, better known as Bernardo Rossellino and Antonio Rossellino. The young Michelangelo lived with a sculptor and his wife in Settignano—in a farmhouse that is now the "Villa Michelangelo"— where his father owned a marble quarry. In 1511 another sculptor was born there, Bartolomeo Ammanati. The marble quarries of Settignano produced this series of sculptors.

Roman remains are to be found in the borgo which claims connections to Septimius Severus—in whose honor a statue was erected in the oldest square in the 16th century, destroyed in 1944— though habitation here long preceded the Roman emperor. Settignano was a secure resort for estivation for members of the Guelf faction of Florence. Giovanni Boccaccio and Niccolò Tommaseo both appreciated its freshness, among the vineyards and olive groves that are the preferred setting for even the most formal Italian gardens.

Mark Twain and his wife stayed at the Villa Viviani in Settignano from September 1892 to June 1893, and greatly enjoyed their visit. Twain was very productive there, writing 1,800 pages including a first draft of Pudd'nhead Wilson. He said the villa "afford[ed] the most charming view to be found on this planet."

In 1898, Gabriele d'Annunzio purchased the trecento Villa della Capponcina on the outskirts of Settignano, in order to be nearer to his lover Eleanora Duse, at the Villa Porziuncola. Near Settignano are the Villa Gamberaia, a 14th-century villa famous for its 18th-century terraced garden, and secluded Villa I Tatti, the villa of Bernard Berenson, now a center of art history studies run by Harvard University.

References[link]

• Official website
• Villa Gamberaia: architecture
• Twain, Mark, The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories, introd. by Malcolm Bradbury (The Oxford Mark Twain, Oxford U. Press, 1996)

Coordinates: 43°47′N 11°19′E / 43.783°N 11.317°E / 43.783; 11.317

Monty Don
Monty Don in 2007
Born	(1955-07-08) 8 July 1955 (age 56) Berlin, Germany
Residence	Ivington, Herefordshire, UK
Nationality	British
Ethnicity	White British
Alma mater	Magdalene College, Cambridge
Occupation	Television presenter, gardener, writer
Years active	(1994-present)
Spouse	Sarah Don (1983-present)
Children	2 sons, 1 daughter
Parents	Denis Don (deceased) Janet (née Wyatt, deceased)

Montagu (Monty) Denis Wyatt Don (born 8 July 1955)^[1] is a British television presenter, writer and speaker on horticulture, best known for presenting the BBC television series Gardeners' World.

Early life[link]

Monty Don was born in Berlin, son of Denis Don, a career soldier posted in Germany and Janet (née Wyatt). Both parents died in the 1980s.^[2] Don has a twin sister, an elder brother David, and two other siblings. His twin suffered a broken neck and blindness in a car crash, aged 19.^[1]

Both his paternal grandmother and grandfather were Scottish; he is descended from the Keiller family of Dundee, inventors of chip marmalade in 1797.

Don was educated at three independent schools: Quidhampton School in Basingstoke, Hampshire, Bigshotte School in Wokingham, Berkshire, and at Malvern College in Malvern, Worcestershire, a college he hated. ^[3] He then attended a state comprehensive school, The Vyne School, in Hampshire. He failed his A levels and while studying for re-takes at night school, worked on a building site and a pig farm by day. During his childhood he had become an avid gardener and farmer.^[3] He determined to go to Cambridge out of “sheer bloody-mindedness”, attending Magdalene College,^[1][4][5] where he read English and met his future wife Sarah. ^[6]

Career[link]

In the 1980s, Don and his wife formed a successful company that made and sold costume jewellery under the name Monty Don Jewellery. The collapse of the company in the early 1990s prompted him to embark on a career in writing and broadcasting. He has written about the rise and collapse of their business in The Jewel Garden, an autobiographical book written with his wife. “We were lambs to the slaughter and we lost everything, [...] we lost our house, our business. We sold every stick of furniture we had at Leominster market,” he wrote. He was unemployed from 1991 to 1993. ^{[1] [3]}

Don's first TV work came as the presenter of a gardening segment on breakfast show This Morning. He featured as a guest presenter for the BBC's Holiday programme. He went on to present several Channel 4 land and gardening series: Don Roaming, Fork to Fork, Real Gardens and Lost Gardens, and wrote a regular weekly gardening column for The Observer between February 1994 and May 2006. Don had never received formal training as a gardener. He commented, "I was – am – an amateur gardener and a professional writer. My only authority came from a lifetime of gardening and a passion amounting to an obsession for my own garden."^[7] He is a keen proponent of organic gardening and the practice of organic techniques, to some extent, features in all of his published work. The organic approach is most prominent in his 2003 book The Complete Gardener.

Don was the main presenter on BBC Two's Gardeners' World from 2003 to 2008 succeeding Alan Titchmarsh. He was the first self-taught horticulturist presenter in the show's 36-year history, stepping down only after suffering a minor stroke. ^{[3] [8]}After viewing figures for Gardener's World fell^[9] below two million for the first time in 2009,^[10] in January 2010, changes were announced to the programme in an attempt to entice viewers back.^[11] In December 2010, it was announced that Don would be returning to the programme as lead presenter for the 2011 series, replacing Toby Buckland.^{[12] [13]} Reaction to the announcement was divided on the programme's blog.^[14] Since March 2011 he has been presenting the programme from his own garden in Herefordshire

Don featured in the BBC programme and book, Growing out of Trouble, in which several heroin addicts manage a 6-acre (24,000 m²) Herefordshire smallholding in an attempt at rehabilitation. ^[3] He also presented Around the World in 80 Gardens (BBC Two 27 January - 30 March 2008) and in December 2008, narrated a programme about the cork oak forests of Portugal, for the BBC's natural history series Natural World.^[15] He presented My Dream Farm, a series which helped people learn to become successful smallholders (Channel 4, January 2010) ^{[16] [17]} and Mastercrafts, a six-part series for BBC Two, which celebrated six traditional British crafts.^[18] He has twice been a panelist on the BBC's Question Time (February 2009 and March 2010) and his family history was the subject of the fourth programme in the seventh series of the BBC genealogy programme Who Do You Think You Are? (August 2010). In April 2011 Don presented Italian Gardens, a four part BBC2 series which was accompanied by the publication of a book.^[19][20]

In late 2008 Don became President of the Soil Association and is a Patron of Bees for Development Trust.^[21]

Personal life[link]

He and Sarah married in 1983 and have three children, Adam, Freya and Tom. The couple lived in Islington, North London while Don pursued postgraduate study at the London School of Economics, worked as a waiter at Joe Allen restaurant in Covent Garden and later as a dustman, and completed two unpublished novels. Meanwhile Sarah trained as a jeweller.

Don has written of his struggle with depression since the age of 25^[22] and Seasonal Affective Disorder.^[3] He describes in his memoir "great spans of muddy time" in which there is nothing but depression. He noted "'Earth heals me better than any medicine".^[3] He has had cognitive behavioural therapy and took Prozac before favouring a lightbox, now a recognised aid for Seasonal Affective Disorder sufferers. He had peritonitis in 2007 and a minor stroke in 2008. ^{[3] [8]}

He currently lives in Pembridge, Herefordshire, England, and has lived in Herefordshire for over 20 years.^[23]

Publications[link]

• 1990: The Prickotty Bush
• 1995: The Weekend Gardener
• 1997: The Sensuous Garden
• 1998: Gardening Mad
• 2003: The Complete Gardener
• 2003: From the Garden to the Table: Growing, Cooking, and Eating Your Own Food
• 2004: The Jewel Garden (Hodder & Stoughton), with Sarah Don
• 2005: Gardening From Berryfields
• 2006: Fork to Fork
• 2006: Growing out of Trouble
• 2006: My Roots: A Decade in the Garden
• 2008: Around the World in 80 Gardens
• 2009: The Ivington Diaries
• 2010: My Dream Farm
• 2011: Italian Gardens

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official Monty Don website
• BBC pages
• Monty Don at the Internet Movie Database
• Who Do You Think You Are page
• The Monty Project
• Social Enterprise Ambassadors
• Monty Don's Final Observer Column
• Video Interview with Monty Don
• Around the World in 80 Gardens.
• Times Interview with Monty Don May 2007.

Desiderio da Settignano, real name Desiderio de Bartolomeo di Francesco detto Ferro (c. 1430 – 1464) was an Italian sculptor active during the Renaissance.

Biography[link]

He came from a family of stone carvers and stonemasons in Settignano, near Florence. Although his work shows the influence of Donatello, specifically in his use of low reliefs, it is most likely that he received his training in the large Florentine workshop run by Bernardo and Antonio Rossellino.^[1] Desiderio matriculated into Florence's Guild of Stone and Woodworkers in 1453 and shortly thereafter already was supplying cherub head medallions for the frieze running across the front of the Pazzi Chapel in the second cloisteryard of the Basilica of Santa Croce.

It is rather surprising that he would have received such an important commission as the Tomb of Carlo Marsuppini so early in his career. Apparently, his design capabilities and sensitivity to the tactile qualities of marble had already been recognized. In composing this wall tomb for the Basilica of Santa Croce, Desiderio relied upon the precedent set only a few years earlier in Bernardo Rossellino's Tomb of Leonardo Bruni. This seems quite appropriate since Marsuppini had succeeded Bruni in the position of Florentine State Chancellor and had been mentored by him just as Deiderio had received his training from Bernardo Rossellini. In fact, in his design for the tomb, Desiderio was paying homage to Bernardo's example in much the same fashion as Marsuppini did when he had composed the epitaph for the Bruni Tomb. Desiderio took over the essential compositional scheme of an elevated triumphal arch containing a sarcophagus and effigy bier from the Bruni monument but transformed the sobriety of the earlier memorial into a work of heightened decorative fancy. In the Marsuppini tomb, Desiderio placed standing children holding heraldic shields on either side of the sarcophagus, draped long festoons from an ornate candelabra which surmounts lunette sarch, and positioned running youths above the pilasters which frame the funeral niche. In the niche itself he ignored the symbolism of the Trinity by using four instead of three panels as the backdrop for the sarcophagus. To increase the visibility of the deceased scholar and statesman, he tilted Marsuppini's effigy forward toward the viewer and carved elaborate floral decorations on the rounded corners of the lion-footed sarcophagus. The motifs used are all classicizing in inspiration and the total effect is light and charming, even joyous, if somewhat unfocused.

In 1461 he finished a tabernacle intended for installation either in the Sacrament Chapel in San Lorenzo,dedicated to the Medici family saints, Cosmas and Damien, located in the left transept of the church or, more likely, it was first installed in the main chapel choir.^[2] For his Tabernacle of the Sacrament, Desiderio returned (as he earlier had done for the Marsuppini Tomb) to a prototype originated by his probable master, Bernardo Rossellino. This time, Desiderio found his inspiration in Rossellino's c. 1450 tabernacle for the chapel of the Women's Hospital of Santa Maria Nuovo (now in San Egidio). What Desiderio produced is unquestionably one of the most decoratively delightful examples of early Renaissance sculpture. The composition consists of a pilaster framed aedicula within which a spatially receding barrel vault leads the eye back to the actual doorway of the sacramental closet. In the lunetteabove is a half-length figure of God/Christ energetically displaying an open book in reference to Revelations 1:8: "I am the Alpha and the Omega; the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord." Half way down this illusionary corridor, angels rush in from side passages, their draperies fluttering with the pictorial excitement of Fra Filippo Lippi. The aedicula of the tabernacle is surmounted by an elaborately framed lunette that encloses an image of the blessing Christ Child standing upon the sacramental chalice flanked by bowing angels. Two more angels, holding tall candelabra, stand in weight-shift pose to either side of the tabernacle. All of this, apparently, rested upon a base containing a relief of the Lamentation which seems rather out of place in an otherwise festive context. Yet this remembrance of Christ's Passion is essential to Desiderio's iconograpic program. The body of Christ forms the base upon which his spiritual body (in the form of the Sacrament)is contained and above which the Benediction is given. Whatever its first location, the tabernacle was removed from space in 1677, dismembered and reassembled for use in the Neroni family chapel in the right transept. For the Neroni, the sculptural components of the tabernacle were recomposed, with the flanking candalabra angels and placed in reverse outward facing positions. Console blocks were used to support the tabernacle which, in a final Baroque touch, was set against a background of colored marble slabs. More recently, the tabernacle has been relocated to the right side of the nave of San Lorenzo and reconstructed in accordance with what is believed to have been the sculptor's original intent, although it is thought that a number of elements have disappeared.

The Lamentation relief provides a fine example of Desiderio's talent for low relief carving but really does not display his mastery of rilievo schiaccato, in the execution of which he was second only to its inventor, Donatello. For Desiderio's handling of "flattened relief" we must turn to his panel of Saint Jerome at Prayer in the Desert (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) or his tondo of the Meeting of Christ and John the Baptist as Youths (Louvre Museum, Paris). The Saint Jerome "comes as close to painting as sculpture can get and the expressive faces of Christ and John in the tondo demonstrate the 15th-century appreciation of Desiderio by Giovanni Santi, the father of Raphael, who spoke of "the dreamy Desiderio so gentle and beautiful."^[3]

Beyond the Marsuppini tomb and the San Lorenzo tabernacle, little of Desiderio's work is documented or dated and a chronological reconstruction of his artistic development is a matter of conjecture based upon stylistic comparisons. The extent of his autograph work has been debated; many works sometimes attributed to him might be better given to assistants, followers, or to his brother Geri, with whom he frequently collaborated.

Desiderio made great contributions in the field of portriature especially as it came to the representation of children. This was a genre which he practically reinvented, drawing upon Roman examples of the Augustan Age. Such sculptures present their youthful subjects with informality even animation; often with open-mouthed expression, they convey a sense of immediacy. His name has been connected with several marble and wooden female busts. The best of these includes the marble bust of Marietta Strozzi in Berlin that projects a soft, ethereal beauty that seems to originate from a marble surface that glows from within the stone.

Throughout his brief career, one of the most telling characteristics of his technique was his unusual ability to give to his sculptures a textural sensuousness that demands touch. Of all Quattrocento sculptors, Desiderio was, perhaps, the most tactile in his appeal. His work displays true understanding for the crystalline luminosity of marble and how a gently polished and modulated surface could produce an inner glow and how Donatello's famed rilievo schiacciato could be further refined to convey a sense of light softly diffused by its passage through atmosphere. At his best Desiderio da Settignano was a sculptor of soft persuasion and subtle nuances.

Desiderio da Settignano died in Florence in 1464. The most famous of his pupils was Simone Ferrucci.

Giorgio Vasari includes a biography of Desiderio da Settignano in his Lives of the Artists.^[4]

Selected works[link]

Jesus and John.

• The tomb of Carlo Marsuppini (1459) in Santa Croce, Florence
• Beauregard Madonna with Standing Christ Child (c. 1455) - marble relief, Norton Simon Museum, Pasedina
• A Little Boy (c. 1455-1460) - marble bust, National Gallery of Art Washington, DC
• The Virgin and Child (c. 1455-1460) - marble relief
• The Christ Child ? (c. 1460) - marble bust, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
• The Altar of the Sacrament in San Lorenzo, Florence (completed in 1461)
• Saint Jerome in the Desert (c. 1461) - marble relief, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
• Ciborium of the Sacrament, marble, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
• St. Jerome in the Desert, marble relief, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
• Madonna and Child in Swaddling Clothes, marble relief, Bargello Museum, Florence
• Laughing Boy, (c. 1464), marble bust, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
• Julius Caesar in Profile,(c. 1460) marble high relief, Louvre Museum, Paris
• Marietta Strozzi, (c. 1460) marble bust, Staatliche Museen, Berlin
• Portrait of a Boy Looking Down, Bargello Museum, Florence
• Young John the Baptist, marble bust, Bargello Museum, Florence
• Jesus and John the Baptist, marble relief tondo, Louvre Museum, Paris

References[link]

External links[link]

• Works by Desiderio da Settignano