Visconti di Modrone uses the same secret techniques to make a small ring and a grand dining table

OSANNA VISCONTI DI MODRONE/ OMV The atelier of Osanna Visconti di Modrone is a stone’s throw from the Gothic wonder that is Milan’s Duomo, but her ‘OMV’-emblazoned showroom invites no part of the cathedral’s tourist throng. Its concealment in the medieval part of town is known to collectors who come, through word of mouth, to claim ownership of the artist’s Ivy Climbing bracelets (with their magnificent creeps of metal Hedera leaves) or her perfect little Paglia di Vienna table, seemingly surfaced in a wicker that belies its constitution of bronze. “Yes, you have to come and look for us,” says Visconti di Modrone, eschewing the ‘shop’ description of the jewellery-box space that she co-designed with Dimore Studio and shares with her daughter Madina, also a jewellery designer. “We are artists.” And the term artist is not overstating her mastery of the lost-wax method of casting bronze — a mould-making process that has changed little since the ancients cast their emperors into solid effigies. Reared in Rome, where the predilections of her parents (her mother a collector of jewellery by the avant-garde likes of Lucio Fontana; her father an architect) infused her sensibility, Visconti di Modrone moved to Milan more than 25 years ago to marry contemporary art dealer Giangaleazzo Visconti di Modrone, whose aristocratic lineage traces back to medieval Milan. His stable of art stars rotates on the home walls that rise above her studio, but Visconti di Modrone insists that they don’t live with ‘looks’ — only ‘likes’. And yet, all that immersion in modern art and architecture must have honed the look of her work — an organic plasticity that reminds of artist Diego Giacometti. Visconti di Modrone, however, credits Mother Nature as her muse and has mapped her path to metal sculpting through gemology studies in New York and an apprenticeship with Roman goldsmith Teresa Schwendt, who taught her the secrets of the lost-wax method. Having crafted furniture for both the Palazzo Fendi Private Suites in Rome and the Schiaparelli Salons Boutique in Paris’ Place Vendôme, Visconti di Modrone uses those same secret techniques to make both a small ring and a grand dining table — always using the same essential iron instruments to model the wax. Recently sculpting a counter for the Petersham Nurseries’ new lifestyle destination in London’s Covent Garden, the artist welcomed the chance to indulge her robust naturalism in a bronze bar textured by leaves in her client’s garden. “No two works are ever the same,” she says, adding that her head, hand and heart always nuance outcomes. “That is the nature of my art.”