Precious art smugglers
About the Zayas couple, whose palace in Seville houses immemorial treasures.
Imagine living in a temple of beauty and knowledge without the need to be locked away in a museum! Anne and Rodrigo de Zayas have turned their 18th-century palace in the heart of Seville into an enchanted home dedicated to the worship of the spirit. Or maybe it's a house of spirits. In any case, you feel enlightened just by entering it following Valérie Bougault, who has written a guided tour worthy of a fairy tale. After crossing the traditional wooden threshold and the superb wrought iron gate, the journey begins. In the middle of the patio, a fountain sings, surrounded by lemon trees, amaryllis and jasmine, and three floors above, the roof terrace immerses its visitors in the whiteness of an Andalusian village à la Federico Garcia Lorca. Between the two, everything is works of art, paintings, music and old books... A real bulwark against barbarism.
Anne and Rodrigo de Zayas, who have been living together for 55 years, founded the group Taller Ziryab to play and sing throughout the world tunes that Andalusia itself had forgotten. He, a renowned guitarist who has brought Renaissance music to the attention of a wide audience and is now devoting himself to writing, and she, a sublime mezzo-soprano, are now surrounded by more than a hundred musical instruments, organs, courtier guitars and vihuelas from the 16th century, but also drawings by Picabia, a watercolour by Cézanne, African statuettes, oriental furniture, engravings, lithographs and post-Cubist paintings by Marius de Zayas, Rodrigo's father, who came from a Spanish aristocracy that emigrated to Cuba and then to Mexico in the early 19th century. Rodrigo's mother, the daughter of the American governor of the Philippines and heiress of the founder of the Central Pacific Railroad, great-grandniece of Thomas Jefferson, entertained James Joyce, Rachmaninov, Derain and Ezra Pound at her home in Paris... Needless to say, all these people were nourished by the spirit of Enlightenment.
"My parents, perfectly self-taught, thought they were in the universalist tradition of Alexander von Humboldt," says Rodrigo de Zayas. "All knowledge deserved to be studied. Or to encourage others to do so. Thus, Rodrigo's life was as cosmopolitan as that of a little boy whose parents sponsored archaeological digs in Egypt or research into Tibetan shamanic culture, lived in Madrid, the United States, France and Damascus, and spoke fluent French, English, Spanish, Italian, German, Arabic and Mandarin. "I had the good fortune to grow up in the atmosphere of an Italian Renaissance principality," smiles the tireless passer-by of art, who is not content to live in his Seville palace surrounded by thirty-five thousand books, each more eclectic than the last, but who makes them available to researchers from all over the world. Not without having collected the archives of his father, a caricaturist, painter, draughtsman and friend of Braque, Apollinaire, Picabia and Picasso, discoverer of primitive African art and initiator with Stieglitz of modern art in New York, to publish in 2021 "Marius de Zayas" by Rodrigo de Zayas, in two volumes, now gathered in a boxed set by the publisher Atelier Baie with "Quand, comment et pourquoi l'art moderne est allé de Paris à New York" by Marius de Zayas, published in 1947.