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ART on view he founded more than thirty years ago. I was also able to access the correspondence he had maintained with dealers and scholars. All of that helped me to gain a better insight into his tastes and motivations, and I was able to understand my father in a much more personal way. Unfortunately, this new closeness between us came to an end with his death in January of 2015 while I was in Paris working on the exhibition with Jacques and André. This sad event led me to redouble my efforts to see the project through. I was determined to honor my father with it. The opening in Florence on the evening of September 18 was a very emotional event for me but also an amazing one. For the fi rst time, the works that I was accustomed to seeing dispersed throughout the various rooms of my family home were displayed all together in a single place. The splendor of the American continent’s great ancient civilizations lay there before my eyes: from the Olmec culture to the Nazca, by way of the 70 Maya, the Aztecs, the Incas, the Tairona, and so many others. T. A. M.: Why was this Pre-Columbian art collection started and how did it develop? I. L.: My father’s limitless curiosity is what steered him toward Pre-Columbian art. He devoted every second of spare time he had to the study of man. He wrote a doctoral thesis with Philippe Taquet at the Sorbonne on fossils in the works of Leonardo da Vinci. Shortly thereafter, in 1971, he embarked on his fi rst fi eld expedition, still in the fi eld of paleontology. In 1973 he founded the Centro Studi Ricerche Ligabue (CSRL), whose areas of activity included archaeology and ethnology. Some years before that, a paleo-Venetian spear point had been given to him by a Prussian entrepreneur, a certain Mr. Krull, who I recently learned was among the most generous benefactors of Venice’s Museo Archeologico Nazionale, and that set him on the path to collecting. He began to acquire all kinds of material evidence of life on earth: fossils, archaeological objects, artifacts of faraway cultures, and, of course, works of art. To return specifi cally to Pre-Columbian art, the collection that this exhibition presents almost in its entirety began with a serpentine mask from Teotihuacan which my father bought from an Italian dealer in 1970. This fi rst acquisition aroused in him a keen interest in the City of the Gods, and he quickly organized a study trip to Mexico. This kind of situation repeated itself often. My father would buy a piece, and his increasing fascination for it would propel him toward a research project with CSRL. The expeditions were always undertaken with the greatest respect for local cultures, and for obvious ethical reasons they were never used as a pretext for obtaining objects for my father’s personal collection. All of his acquisitions were made on the art market, in keeping with my father’s interests and dictated by opportunities as they presented themselves. The latest objects to enter the collection are acquisitions that I myself made in order to fi ll in certain gaps. These are just ten or so objects, including the Veracruz yoke and the Mayan hacha in the exhibition, which help explain and illustrate the ball game that was so important to Mesoamerican cultures. T. A. M.: In addition to the works in the Ligabue Collection, Il mondo che non c’era presents highlights from the Medici Collection. What were you trying to achieve with these loans, and how did you secure them? FIG. 5 (left): Standing fi gure. Veracruz, Gulf Coast, Mexico. AD 600–900. Terracotta. H: 26 cm.


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