Portrait of a Painter in Siena

Visiting the artist Beau Gabriel during his residency at the grand Villa di Vicobello

Buzzcut is a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by Zander Abranowicz, strategy director at Abbreviated Projects. Read our past tributes to Oscar Haimo (legendary bartender of The Pierre), Peter Kaplan (beloved editor of The New York Observer), and more. This edition is best in your browser or on the Substack app.

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Personal Pantheon

A tribute to someone inspiring

Portrait of a Painter in Siena

Siena is fifty miles from Florence, but in the time it took to travel by train from the city of Dante to the city of Saint Catherine, my mind ventured much farther. I went back to my childhood in Bedford, New York, and the early days of my friendship with the man I was on my way to see: Beau Gabriel, the painter, currently in-residence at the Villa di Vicobello, a sixteenth century estate considered one of the finest Renaissance-era homes and gardens in the region.

I met Beau thousands of miles away, on the lacrosse field, when we were 11. He had straight, shoulder-length hair, rosy cheeks, a faint scar down the bridge of his nose, and an amused, knowing smile. He had a twin named Henry. I immediately wanted to be their third brother, and we soon became a merry trio. Henry went to private school; Beau to public school with me. But we did most of our learning at home, both coming from families of readers and writers. The Gabriels lived in an 1861 home built around the old one-room schoolhouse in Pound Ridge, Bedford’s slightly more woodsy sibling, with a clutch of chickens and a Norfolk terrier.

The house suited Beau: he lived, then as now, with one foot in the present, and another in the past. In middle school and high school, he practiced oboe and carriage driving. I practiced falconry. These were hardly the average pastimes of the American teen. Beau gave me permission to embrace my more anachronistic interests, a gift.

Our friendship grew in the forests around our homes, where we dressed up as guerrillas, armed ourselves with mock rifles, and went on sorties against imaginary White Russians and other perceived enemies of the people. (There is, I later learned, some precedent for these antics: in 1969 a Westchester high school teacher taught a course in guerrilla war tactics, telling The New York Times: “Revolution and guerrilla warfare are happening all over the world, and I think students in Scarsdale should know about it.”) We wore long wool military coats and other surplus garments of war to middle school — no doubt to the puzzlement of our teachers, coaches, and peers — and decoded historical references in The Clash albums.

Beau has always been an artist, with a preternaturally steady hand that produced reams of perfect illustrations — complex naval battles and cavalry charges, cherubs and charioteers — and a prolific comic series starring his vulpine alter-ego, Sly Fox the Sneak. I can still see his hand guiding a No. 2 Ticonderoga pencil over printer paper in his living room, while the fireplace hisses. We worshiped Hergé, creator of Tintin, and imitated his signature ligne claire style. Beau’s exquisite penmanship still bears traces of that great Belgian artist’s typography.

After graduating from Yale, where he sang in a Russian men’s choir and performed in a Baroque orchestra, Beau went to live in Paris. He worked for a spell at a law firm. I visited a few times, always enjoying his ensemble of peripatetic young friends around tables strewn with his ambitious dishes (I especially recall one delicious oxtail stew), bottles of wine, and ashtrays. After a few years he relocated to London to attend the Royal College of Art, and pursue his God-given talent in earnest. He set up a studio in Hackney, where once, he painted my portrait.

Loosely speaking, Beau’s practice applies the style of classical painting to the substance of modern objects, figures, and settings. One series depicted influencers in a style recalling his beloved Pontormo, bringing a timeless grace to the ephemeral icons of our moment. My first real art acquisition was a painted study from this period, a delicate rendering of a woman’s blushed, perpetually wistful face. It gazes out from the wall above our bookshelves in Brooklyn. Recently, in his series “Salt Marsh Hay,” Beau mined memories of summers spent on the Maine coast, putting lobster rolls, Igloo coolers, and oyster rakes in the hands of sylphlike denizens of landscapes evoking Mount Desert Island and Castine.

In June, I arrived in Siena and took a taxi uphill to the Villa di Vicobello, which lords over that cradle of the early Renaissance. It was designed by Baldassarre Peruzzi in the 1500s, an age of Black Death and conflict with the rival Duchy of Florence. Peruzzi was an accomplished architect of grand structures all over these parts, even contributing to projects at the Vatican, where, in 1520, he succeeded Raphael as the architect of St. Peter’s. At St. Peter's, his client was God, but here, it was the Chigi banking dynasty. Its signature domed mountains are still sculpted into impressive topiaries throughout the property.

Vicobello makes an appearance in Edith Wharton’s 1904 book Italian Villas and Their Gardens, alongside a Maxfield Parrish illustration of its exedra — a Greco-Roman style open-air recess with seating — framed by cypress trees. Of Vicobello, Wharton wrote:

“The descending walled gardens, with their different levels, gives opportunity for many charming architectural effects — busts in niches, curving steps, and well-placed vases and statues; and the whole treatment of Vicobello is remarkable for the discretion and sureness of taste with which these ornamental touches are added. There is no excess of decoration, no crowding of effects, and the garden-plan is in perfect keeping with the simple stateliness of the house.”

In other words, Vicobello was the ideal setting for Beau’s latest residency, supported by the gallerist Caspar Giorgio Williams of C.G. Williams, culminating in an exhibit now on view at the villa, with panels hung in the same airy studio space where they were painted.

When I arrived, the taxi driver couldn’t quite find the entrance to the walled estate. Beau came out to fetch me on a dirt road that cut through olive groves, kicking up dust in his paint-splattered loafers. Ever natty, he wore faded jeans, a white t-shirt, and navy cardigan, and had grown a modest beard. (His sartorial ease was a far cry from the self-conscious fashion socialites crowding in Florence for the summer edition of Pitti Uomo, the menswear fair.)

Knowing we only had a few hours quickened our pace a bit. Like boys on imaginary maneuvers in a Westchester forest, we marched through life news, asking after each other’s families, recounting recent good times and bad, sharing what books and music and art we’d been enjoying. We talked fast and walked slow, perusing the stately grounds, much the same as they were when they were inspected by Edith Wharton at the turn of the century. The roses were blooming, honeysuckle emitted its sweet perfume, and those quintessential Italian cypress drifted in the hilltop breeze. We were trailed by two dogs, a dappled English setter and its humble companion.

We ended at the jewel of Vicobello: a citrus garden, virtually unchanged since it was planted hundreds of years ago, accessible through an ornate gate. Scattered throughout the segmented space were large terracotta vases, emblazoned with the Chigi crest, housing the family’s ancient strains of lemon and orange trees. The dogs jumped playfully over the low hedgerows, stopping now and then to rest in the shade, panting lightly. Magpies circled overhead, beneath rococo clouds.

In the studio, which overlooks the storied citrus garden, evidence of an active few weeks was everywhere. Occupying the assorted panels were elegant figures, many modeled by friends, alongside Italianate motifs: bottles of wine, plastic lawn chairs, lush flora and fauna, ripe fruit. He had plenty of work to do before the opening, but the contours of an extraordinary exhibit were already deep in formation. The show, titled “Roadside Thistles,” was announced with a beautiful introduction that captured, in Beau’s own language, a nostalgic sense of this place, in a style befitting Giuseppe di Lampedusa, author of aristocratic loss and that classic lament: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” It ends:

“These paintings reach for what has already slipped away: illusive history, young memory, first love. Awareness of passing time shades reverie with sorrow, and what once brought delight now stings. But even a roadside thistle is a thing of beauty, and if that is all I can hold, it is enough.”

For lunch, Beau cooked classic Sienese fare: wild boar ragù over pici — a local pasta — plus a fresh salad, bread, and red wine. We sat in the exedra, and conversation continued to pour out of us. While we talked, it dawned on me that we were still those same children, still inventing our own reality, only now with stubble and stable relationships, inhabiting our own imitation of Tintin when possible, forging our livelihoods in art and commerce. Far from Westchester, here we were: two grown-up children, in a garden in Siena, perfectly at home in the past.

“Roadside Thistles” by Beau Gabriel is on view at the Villa di Vicobello in Siena through the end of July. You can follow Beau on Instagram here.

Photo by Ela Bialkowska, courtesy of C.G. Williams

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Sonic Landscapes

A mix, echoing my old college radio show

To accompany this edition of Buzzcut, I’ve picked 10 songs to spin in the citrus garden at your renaissance villa, on a train through the English countryside, poolside in Santorini, or on a melancholy flight back to the States.

1. Rebecca’s Theme (Water) — A.R.T. Wilson

2. World on a String — Jessica Pratt

3. Mountains, Trees and Seas — Matthew Halsall

4. Ta Nyé — Ballaké Sissoko and friends

5. License to Kill — Bob Dylan

6. At Last I Am Free — Robert Wyatt

7. Ship of Fools — John Cale

8. Lord Abore and Mary Flynn — Lankum

9. Clear Away in the Morning — Gordon Bok

10. The Dark Eyed Sailor (live) — Olivia Chaney

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Something You Should Know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

A final herd of mammoths survived on Wrangel Island, in the East Siberian Sea, until roughly 4,000 years ago, meaning they were still extant during the construction of the Great Pyramids in Egypt