In 1949, the poet Jean Cocteau, met Francine Weisweiller, it happened during the shooting for the Enfants Terribles movie, based on his famous novel and shot by a young filmmaker of the time, Jean Pierre Melville. It was Nicole Stéphane (Nicole de Rothschild), the main actress of the film and cousin of Alec Weisweiller who presented the poet to Francine. In the Spring of 1950 after the editing of the Enfants Terribles, Francine invited Jean Cocteau to spend a week in her house in St. Jean Cap Ferrat.
The Santo Sospir villa was built shortly after the war and was purchased by Alec and Francine in 1946. Used as a holiday home, the walls of the villa remained empty till Cocteau stay. A few days after his arrival, he said: “I’m tired of idleness, I wither here…”. He asked Francine if he could draw the head of Apollo above the fireplace in the living room.
Inch by inch, he tattooed with frescoes all the walls of the house, Matisse was not wrong when saying “When you decorate a wall, it’s like you are decorate the others”. Cocteau also narrated how Picasso opened and closed all doors of the house: “So it remained to paint on the doors: this is what I tried to do. But doors open to rooms; rooms have walls, and if doors are painted, walls look empty…”.
I didn’t have to dress the walls; I had to paint on their skin, that’s why I treated the frescoes linearly, with few colours that enhanced the tattoos. Santo Sospir is a tattooed villa.
His iconic frescoes are called in tempera: after drawing with charcoal, the poet enhanced them with colours which an Italian workman prepared for him diluting coloured powders in raw milk. Most of the frescos refer to Greek mythology, but some hint at French Riviera’s fishermen and their nets, the sea urchin and the Fougasse (typical bread from Nice). Two years after completing the walls of the villa, Cocteau focused on the ceilings. Finding them too white, he decided to paint them with pastels in very soft tones. He realized two mosaics for the patio: the one on the threshold shows two faces and a snake while the other on the left portrays Orpheus’s head. For many years, he spent long time at the villa of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and his words still echoes in the mind of those who looking at this powerful walls hear “I became myself a wall and these walls spoke for me”.
