Photographer and Collector: Massimo Listri

At the home of Massimo Listri, along with Mario Praz, to meet the collector who stands beyond the interior photographer, and his image

di Marco Riccòmini

«..we were ushered into the waiting room – Praz narrates in The Baltimore Pearl (‘Il Tempo,’ June 27, 1967), – a vast underground room full of people, but among the human heads stood out marble and bronze heads, copies of busts of Roman emperors, late nineteenth-century bronzes overloaded with gestures and swirls; and on the walls paintings and drawings and pseudo-sixteenth-century furniture: modest prelude to the upper rooms, moderate overture to the great orchestra that struck us full on like an onslaught of cymbals, trombones and bass drums as soon as it was our turn to ascend».

The interior of Massimo Listri's home in Florence. © Massimo Listri.
The interior of Massimo Listri’s home in Florence. © Massimo Listri.

What stuns the visitor, as soon as he sets foot in Massimo Listri’s house, is the accumulation of Roman marbles, whole statues or fragments, pieces and busts, resting on ancient breccia consoles held up by feral paws of statuary marble, or perched on colorful shelves caressing the arched vaults of the very tall room; and then objects of all sorts: Baroque paintings, narwhal teeth, Hellenistic vases, Roman bas-reliefs, huge Piranesian prints.

You know those paintings… no, indeed: let’s take Praz again, who says it best, although he writes from Maryland and here, in Florence, a step away from Santo Spirito, we couldn’t be further away, but the contrast is even more striking: “Who has not seen in some museum one of those Flemish paintings depicting a room with walls completely covered with paintings, tables cluttered with objects, usually reproducing rooms of collections, real or imaginary, or settings for allegorical representations: paintings by Francken, by Bruegel of the Elder, by Hans Jordaens III, by Zoffany or by our Panini? Environments where the tingle of forms reaches hallucination and delirium.”

And I, who, after the cyclical and ritual pilgrimage to the little palace in London overlooking Lincoln’s Inn Field, i.e., Sir John Soane’s residence, now the museum that bears his name, thought that no more could fill a house than that, had to change my mind.

The interior of Massimo Listri's home in Florence. © Massimo Listri.
The interior of Massimo Listri’s home in Florence. © Massimo Listri.

After all, drawing from the fine Anglist’s examples, Listri, who was born on the banks of the Arno, grew up with the model (or myth, one would think at this point) of The Uffizi Tribune painted around 1776 by Johann Zoffany (1733-1810) or, rather, posed and portrayed with a touch of imagination, such is the crowd that surrounds all those items reproduced with miniature accuracy, partly crashed, hurriedly descended from other walls, lent from other buildings (as when, in a group photo even those who were not part of the school trip, the group or the soccer team join in a moment before the photographer’s click).

At first impression one is struck by the ensemble, well calibrated in color as well as in volume, so much so that the example of the German painter naturalized Englishman must have also served the Florentine photographer to choose pantones at the tapestry maker’s or tints with the painter. Then, looking better, when the eye gets used to the sometimes low or artificial light of certain lamps (oil lamps?), placed at the head of Imari vases with gilded bronze bases, one realizes that it is not only good furniture, but that there is also Substance (to use the name of the Florentine Trattoria that is closest to our hearts, called, among friends, “Il Troia”).

The interior of Massimo Listri's home in Florence. © Massimo Listri.
The interior of Massimo Listri’s home in Florence. © Massimo Listri.

And that’s even before we’ve gone upstairs, which, instead of housing the Haussner restaurant, as in Praz’s narration («whose walls are covered from top to bottom with paintings of every kind»), houses collections that, to be digested, require even finer palates and stomachs, such as those showcases filled with precious Wunderkammer objects «resting on easels, on busts, on globes, mingled with coins, shells, astrolabes, monkeys, dogs, telescopes, compasses» Praz would have assured. While here it is corals, ivories, cups made from engraved coconuts, nautilus shells, carapaces of marine tortoises, and red and white plaster casts in profusion, replicating in miniature a universal museum of Greek and Roman antiquities, almost for fear that something might have escaped.

«Sight, my God, comes out sick from too much seeing» (Praz again). If the term existed it would be “cupio possidendi”, a disease that is far from rare and that, often, afflicts those who endure the beauty. I don’t know if it is transmissible, I would have to talk to my attending physician (the one, however, who treats the problems of the mind and not troubles of the body), but if it were, surely anyone who visits the Florentine mansion of the great interior photographer could be seriously infected.