March/April
2002 
The Fountain of Oceanus in the museum courtyard
The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art
They may have named John and Mable Ringling's winter residence for the man of the house, but it was Mable's eye that conceived it and her taste that adorned it.
And, since 1995, architects, art restorers, artisans, engineers and Old World craftsmen have toiled to excavate her soul from layers of grime, mold, salt air, decay and re-interpretation. It is to her exacting original standards that all 30 of the palazzo's rooms, 13 baths, fixtures, furniture and art have been restored. Even the Belvedere Tower - fashioned after the tower at New York's old Mad-ison Square Gar-den-has been re-turned to its original glory.
"Even though this is the House of John, it's really the House of Mable," said Aaron H. De Groft, deputy director and chief curator of the Ringling Museum and director of the renovation project.
Now, after nearly seven years and millions
of dollars, the Cà d'Zan (House of John in the Venetian
dialect) is set to open its doors April 27 to the world and to
a Sarasota that is vastly different from the Prohibition-era
days when Mable and John entertained society's elite, drank private-bottle
bourbon and lounged among exotic birds and animals along Sarasota
Bay.
"People are going to see a vastly different Cà d'Zan,"
De Groft said.
The idea behind the latest and most complete renovation is to restore the Cà d'Zan as accurately as possible. That means scraping wallpaper, removing wainscoting, varnish and paint down to the layers that Mable chose, De Groft said.
"She had a say in everything," he said. "She would walk around with paint and cloth samples and sometimes she'd see a color up on the wall and immediately change it. So, we have to determine which color we use for historic purposes."
De Groft has 70 years of redesigns and redecorations
to peel up, scrape off and sweep out.
One of the most striking changes that visitors will notice: neutral,
muted and tonal colors.
"Mable had a real logic to what she was doing," De
Groft said. "There are these sort of mid tones and neutral
kinds of colors that set off the furniture and decorative arts
very well."
De Groft said it was common in a room to have the color tones of the walls darken or lighten subtly from baseboard to wall to cornice to ceiling, depending on how the light worked in the room and what Mable was trying to accomplish.
De Groft explained that visitors came to know a different Cà d'Zan because Mable's logic was lost on subsequent curators.
"Mable had interesting tastes," De Groft said. Indeed the home's architecture borrows from at least three major periods from Venetian Gothic to Italian and French Renaissance to French Neo-Classical. The façade was derived from Venetian canal palazzos.
Wrapped in that taste were healthy doses of mischief and fun. She had a bathroom of black and yellow marble so striking in contrast that it was named for the bumble bee. She even had the insides of closets and medicine cabinets painted with beautiful neo-Oriental images of birds and classical views. The playroom featured wild commedia dell'arte and Carnivale images of frolicking and drinking that give the feeling of a dark and mysterious fairy tale, De Groft said.
Guiding the restoration were the museum's archival photos plus nearly all of the original furnishings. Internationally known artisans worked on the restoration, and the entire project drew on the shrinking number of craftsmen still skilled in Old World methods.
Even as small a detail as the intricate, hand-woven tassels and fringe on the conserved and restored furniture came to the restorers' attention. They were hand-crafted to look much as they did during the time of John and Mable-and are, in fact, based on those historic designs.
Mable was 54 when she died in 1929, after a mere three-and-a-half years of enjoying the home she traveled the globe to furnish, decorate and lavishly equip. John died seven years later at the age of 70.
But with the countless hours that De Groft
and hundreds of others have devoted to the project, it's as if
Mable and John Ringling are once again holding festive court
in
the Cà d'Zan.
-Mark Riordan, Frank Murphy, Fran Conaway
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