Count Natale ‘Luccio’ Labia
South African economist who handled a rich legacy from ‘Randlord’ and Venetian noble forebears
COUNT NATALE “LUCCIO” LABIA, who has died aged 92, was descended from two of the most prominent families in South Africa and became a leading figure in the cultural life of his country and an eminent Keynesian economist.
His maternal grandfather was the “Randlord” Sir Joseph (JB) Robinson, Bt, who, with his huge wealth from diamond and gold mining, between 1895 and 1900 built up one of the most valuable private collections of Old Masters in the world, focusing on Renaissance, Dutch, Flemish and British works, including a version of Reynolds’s Blue Boy and works by Millais, including the famous Cherry Ripe.
The collection also included some superb Italian and Spanish paintings, as well as fine furniture and porcelain. Settling with his family in London, he bought Dudley House in Park Lane and filled it with his collection.
Count Luccio’s father, Count Natale Labia, was Italy’s first ambassador to South Africa and the scion of an old Venetian family which had been one of the wealthiest in 19th century Europe. The count married the mining magnate’s eldest daughter Ida, and when Robinson died in 1929 they inherited most of his fortune, including his collection of more than 100 works of art, which had been warehoused in London in 1912 after the sale of Dudley House. Count Natale died of a heart attack in 1936, supposedly from the stress of having to defend Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia.
The younger of two sons, Natale Antonio Diodato Labia, known as “Luccio”, was born in Cape Town on September 30 1924 and spent his childhood partly at Hawthornden, the family mansion in Wynberg where grandfather Robinson had lived and died, and partly at the Fort, a 20-room Venetian-style mansion his father built in Muizenberg in 1929 as the Italian ambassador’s residence.
To furnish its ornate interior, Count Natale imported furniture, Murano glass mirrors, crystal chandeliers, silk wallpaper, splendid carpets and gilded ceiling panels from Venice. He even imported a Venetian gondola, complete with gondolier. On their first outing on a nearby lake, however, gondola and gondolier were swept into the reeds by a strong wind. They were returned to Venice on the same boat on which they arrived.
Luccio was educated at Bishops Diocesan College, then at Westminster School in London. Returning to Cape Town at the outbreak of the Second World War, he studied at the University of Cape Town and later read Law and Economics at Christ’s College, Cambridge. After graduation he joined the Department of Foreign Affairs in Pretoria, intending to follow his father into a diplomatic career.
In 1958 Count Luccio travelled to London to inspect his grandfather’s art collection and subsequently 84 works were exhibited at the Royal Academy before being packaged and shipped to Cape Town, where they caused a sensation when they were exhibited at the South African National Gallery, prompting Ernest Jansen, the then governor-general of the Union of South Africa, to express the hope that the collection would be given to the gallery permanently.
Count Luccio refused to do so, although he subsequently indicated that the family was willing to sell it for considerably less than it was worth. When the government failed to make an offer after protracted negotiations, the collection was shipped back to London. Later on, individual paintings from the collection fetched more at auction than the family had wanted for the entire collection.
After the death of their mother, Princess Labia, in 1961 (in 1938 King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy had posthumously conferred the hereditary title of “Prince” on her husband), Luccio and his older brother Joseph inherited the collection, and during the 1960s some of the pictures were sold at auction as well as a quantity of porcelain including some fine Sèvres items which are now in the V& A, and items of furniture including a set of early 18th century chairs which now form part of the royal collection in Windsor Castle.
After the National Party government began to implement apartheid, Count Luccio gave up his diplomatic career and returned to Britain where he did postgraduate work in economics at the London School of Economics. Returning to South Africa, he was appointed a lecturer in the economics department at the University of Witwatersrand, becoming deputy head of the department before joining the economics department of the University of Cape Town, remaining there until his retirement in 1984.
During the 1960s and 1970s the Fort had been leased to the Canadian then the Argentine Embassy. In the mid1980s, however, Count Luccio donated the building, along with all its antique furniture and 10 paintings from the Robinson collection, plus an adjoining piece of land, to the South African government to be used as a satellite museum for the South African National Gallery.
As a condition of the gift he stipulated that the house be preserved in its original style, be used as a centre for cultural events and temporary exhibitions and that it was to remain open to the public. FW de Klerk, then minister of national education, opened it officially as the Natale Labia Museum, named in honour of Luccio’s father, and it became one of the Cape Peninsula’s most important cultural assets, the venue for exhibitions, lectures, musical recitals and art classes.
In 2004, however, the National Gallery quietly sold the adjoining land without the count’s consent for what seemed a ridiculously small sum, closed the museum and withdrew all financial support. Subsequently it hired out the house for commercial film shoots, but otherwise left it to the ravages of vandals and the elements.
“The laminated windows have gone opaque because of water seepage,” a visitor reported in 2007. “Inside walls are peeling with mould, vases are cracked, the great crystal chandeliers are grime-encrusted, hinges are broken, brass fittings are missing, carpets are stained, there are cigarette burns in antique chairs, and a R450 000 painting, a woodland scene by James Stark, has disappeared.”
In 2008 Count Luccio took the Department of Public Works and the National Museums to court, claiming that they had breached the deed of donation. He obtained an out-of-court settlement to have the mansion returned to his family, and, with his daughter Antonia, set to work to restore the Fort to its former glory. Reopened in 2010 as Casa Labia, it is now run by the family as a cultural centre and restaurant.
Count Luccio was a vintage car enthusiast who inherited two De Dietrichs, 1903 and 1905 models, from the Robinson collection, and a Fiat 525N which Mussolini had given to his father in 1929. The 1903 De Dietrich is now in the Beaulieu Motor Museum from where it regularly takes part in the London to Brighton run. Other cars were kept at Hawthornden, the family mansion in Wynberg where he lived in his later years.
In 1980 he married Sylvia Henderson, who survives him with their son and daughter. Count Natale “Luccio” Labia, born September 30 1924, died November 13 2016