Grazing in Lucan: Italian ambassador’s residence opens to public with herd of buffalo sculptures

As you turn left inside the gates of the large country house just west of Dublin, there’s a startling sight. It’s a herd of buffalo. The almost-black beasts are not native to the area, and are about one and half times life size, to boot. Even knowing what’s coming, seeing them makes you laugh out loud – for the sheer unexpectedness, and joyousness, of buffalo grazing in the summer sun on rolling lawns in front of a Palladian mansion.

This is Lucan House, residence of the Italian ambassador to Ireland, and Ruggero Corrias has turned his new 12-acre front garden into a home for eight bronze “bufale” by the celebrated Italian artist Davide Rivalta. Inside, in the middle of the large 18th-century front hall, is an oversized white cavallo – a horse – in homage to the Irish equestrian tradition.

If you have visited Dublin Castle over the past few weeks you may have come upon a large bronze leonessa in the main courtyard, there because “the lioness is a symbol of strength, in Dublin Castle where you regained your independence”, the ambassador says. “It’s pretty impressive. It is very popular already, the first thing you see coming in from Dame Street.”

Grazing in Lucan, as the buffalo installation is called, is part of the embassy’s commitment, along with the Italian Cultural Institute of Dublin, to promote Italian art. Nine months ago, when Corrias was posted here, “I immediately realised that this park was bound to become something,” he says.

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Originally Lucan Manor, the house was acquired in 1566 by the Sarsfield family – Patrick Sarsfield became the first Lord Lucan – which later intermarried with the Veseys, one of whom rebuilt it as a Palladian villa around 1775, after falling in love with the architecture on a grand tour of Italy.

The Italian government rented the property during the second World War, then bought it in 1954. Its neat entrance gate is right on the main street of Lucan village, and behind the high granite wall are 12 acres of manicured parkland along the banks of the river Liffey.

“Look, this is what we have: something has to happen here,” Corrias said to himself. He “had the idea immediately to convert this to a sculpture park”. So he and Cristiana Collu, of Italy’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, in Rome, decided to bring Rivalta’s work here. “He has changed some sights of Rome with his lions, especially the Villa Borghese, which is our Phoenix Park. His animals are in Ravenna, and in a Medici castle near Firenze.”

Rivalta, who lives and works in Bologna, creates larger-than-life animals – rhinoceros, wolves, buffalo, horses, gorillas – in bronze, aluminium or fibreglass. He says he looks to nature and shows them in a docile attitude “that at times is in contrast to their majesty and the violence of our dealings with them”. His enigmatic animals are primarily in public spaces of international cities, and are permanently exhibited in Ravenna, Neuchâtel, Rome, Florence and Mougins.

Up close, the buffalo’s dark textured surface invites touch, and it feels warm in the June sun, as if the beasts are alive. Rivalta says the buffalo has “drawn me in a lot. It’s an ungraceful animal, but it’s gifted with a quietness and firmness that make it unique.”

Grazing in Lucan was installed in Dublin just in time to celebrate Italian national day at Lucan House, on June 2nd; on May 31st, Vittorio Sgarbi, Italy’s deputy minister of culture, joined Rivalta and a cross-section of Italians living here.

While the lioness is already provoking selfies at Dublin Castle, overseen by the Office of Public Works, the Lucan House buffalo installation opens to the public on July 1st; a display in the castle links to information and booking.

The ambassador says the buffalo were cast using the same technique as the Riace bronzes, the naked bearded warriors, dating from circa 460 BC, that were found in the sea near Riace, in Calabria, in 1972: lost-wax casting using a series of moulds, in multiple steps involving clay, wax and molten bronze. “It’s a very difficult technique, but it’s a very old technique. The weight of each is almost one ton. They are empty inside, but they weigh 700kg or 800kg each.”

Even getting the buffalo to Ireland sounds quite the operation. They arrived by truck, “and with the forklift they were downloaded discreetly and moved into the grounds. The artist decided where to put them, and then they were fixed under the grass” on a surface to keep them steady and anchored. They will be in Lucan until April.

“Buffalo are migrant animals. They came originally from Asia. Italy and Ireland are two migrant countries. Buffalo established very well in Italy. They became a symbol of our cuisina also: buffalo mozzarella, etc.”

Corrias will presumably be looking out at them every morning; he already talks about them affectionately as we stand among them. “This one is leading the group, and she faces the embassy. She stops, asking, What’s that? Those ones are coming. That one is walking, calling the others, asking, What is it?” He points. “This is watching the other two who have already arrived, and that one is watching the house. And then there is the lazy one at the end, just stopping, licking its foot. She is losing time, no? I love that one, the lazy one.”

We go inside. The large front hall, with its colonnades and Roman busts, is dominated temporarily by Rivalta’s startling white fibreglass horse. Off that hall is another hall with a gracious staircase, and the large rooms used for entertaining: a library with bookcases and tapestries; then the Wedgwood Room, a drawingroom with beautiful Robert Adam plasterwork on the walls and ceiling. It’s also called the Blue Room (“because the lady of the Vesey family used to host at the end of the 18th century some cultural evenings here every week, and it was called the Bluestocking Club”). Next, a beautiful music room with more elaborate plasterwork, and the expansive diningroom, an oval room said to have inspired James Hoban, who visited Lucan House when it was being built, while he was studying architecture in Dublin, which was many years before he designed the White House, in Washington, DC, and its Oval Office.

At the evening celebrating Festa della Repubblica, as guests mingle among buffalo on the lawn, Davide Rivalta describes making the animals. “The first step, I take many, many pictures of the real buffalo in the farm” where they make mozzarella. “They have many buffalo, very beautiful buffalo. And every single buffalo is a portrait, an individual portrait. If you look, is very different. I come back to the studio. I choose the buffalo, the position.”

He makes a little model or maquette in clay, then the full-size sculpture in clay, on a steel-and-wood frame. “The clay is very, very, very wet. It’s like a crema.” In something of an understatement, he says that “it’s very, very simple to make”. Demonstrating, he mimes taking a lump of this gooey clay, grunting and going pffuff, and throwing it at the buffalo, pulling it down into a shape with his hands. The dynamism of this action is visible in the large bold strokes on the bronze surface of the cast sculpture.

Moulds are made with rubber and plaster; the foundry then casts the sculptures. Manlio Bonetto, owner of Fonderia Artistica de Carli, in Turin, who came to Dublin with Rivalta to install the sculptures, comes over to join us. He describes how they cast the enormous bronze beast in 30 pieces, about 5mm thick, then welded them together.

Rivalta’s first animal sculpture was of a gorilla in the zoo, he says. He sculpts animals because “until 1900 people lived very near, together with animals. But now there is a separation. But we are instinctively attracted to animals and when we meet animals all are surprised and attracted and will touch. This encounter, I think, is important. The sensation for people with the animals is a positive meeting.”

He says the buffalo is an animal “that has drawn me in a lot”; he has sculpted 14 of them. “The buffalo is peaceful, I think. The lioness in the castle, she is stronger. She walks, but she is not aggressive to the people. The lioness was in a zoo. Every animal I make is in captivity, in zoos or on farms. I put them in the landscape. And give to animals a new freedom.”

Grazing in Lucan, by Davide Rivalta, at Lucan House, Lucan, Co Dublin, opens to the public on Saturdays from July 1st until April 2024. Tickets are free from Eventbrite. The Leonessa (Lioness) is in the Upper Yard of Dublin Castle, Dublin 2