An Homage to Buontalenti.

I did not win this context for a development located next to a well known and historical live action

and musical theatre. A facing wall of the neighboring theatre forms the eastern side of the plaza with

its set back building development.

My idea for the plaza for the Theatre Park development is playful yet serious and complex in

meaning. It involves five large animal heads whose mouths function as water fountains. The

animals are common to the Southern Ontario area and include the Red Fox, the Grey Squirrel,

the Snapping Turtle, the Black Bear, and the Great Horned Owl. They are set in a kind of rock

face suggestive of a grotto. The rock face issues from the top and bottom of the wall to the east

so that it confronts the pool feature. The rock face brackets a highly reflective or mirrorlike

surface. Viewers standing in front of the pool see themselves as audience members in the act

of engagement with the work so that they are literally embodied within the circulating semiotics

of the work.

Half-emerged and half-formed faces of delicate little children can be discerned from place to

place within the crags of the rock face. Referenced here is the great under-appreciated Italian

sculptor, Medardo Rosso (1858-1928), whose work often expressed a deliberately “unfinished”

quality. Underlining this incomplete quality, Rosso’s work often dealt with children, as in his

Ecce Puer (Behold the Child) of 1906.

Together, the rocky wall replete with animal heads and children’s face call up the world of

theatre as well as childhood imagination and innocence. Theatre is doubly identified in the

recursive relationship of viewers to the question of embodiment in terms of their reflections in

both the wall and pool. The effect of theatricality is further underlined in reference to the title of

my proposal, which pays homage to Bernardo Buontalenti (1531-1608), the designer of the

famous Boboli Gardens grotto that is identified with his name as the Buontalenti Grotto in Florence,

Italy. Significant is the fact that his family name translates into “good or great talents,” a

basic requirement of good theatre.

The fabrication of the sculpture would utilize traditional and contemporary techniques. The

sculpture would first be sculpted out of plaster. Next a larger version would be milled out of

foam by a computer. This would further be sculpted by hand before being finished with either

a Fiberglass or epoxy coating, which would mimic the look of bronze.