Rhythms of ‘Modern Dance: Isadora Duncan’s Renaissance

Originally published in

RESTORATION CONVERSATIONS magazine

AUTUMN/WINTER, Issue 10

by Federica Parretti

Isadora Duncan dancing in an amphitheatre in Athens, ph. Raymond Duncan, 1903. Source: Brittanica

Former dancer and choreographer Federica Parretti explores the life of Isadora Duncan, the American-born dancer, heralded as the ‘Mother of Modern Dance’. Bored with the constraints of classical ballet, Duncan abandoned her corset and pointe shoes, and turned to the ancient Greeks for inspiration. In her performances, dance became a ritual and a sacred art, as in times of old. Her philosophy, which embraced natural grace and the rhythmic flow of human movement, opened the field to all body types, and revolutionized performance expectations among audiences and dancers alike. Duncan’s work inspired copious sketches by numerous artists of her day, including Auguste Rodin, Antoine Bourdelle and Abraham Walkowitz.

While reading Isadora Duncan’s posthumously published diary, My Life, I came across a passage that gave me a sense of serendipity. “With his usual impulsiveness, he amused himself by buying some land in Cap Ferrat, with the idea of building a grand Italian-style castle there,” Duncan wrote in her 1927 manuscript. “We took a few drives to visit the towers of Avignon and the ramparts of Carcassonne, which were to serve as models for his castle, but alas, like many of his whimsical projects, it was never completed.”

This passage refers to Paris Singer, the father of Isadora Duncan’s second child. Paris was one of the twenty-four heirs of Isaac Singer – the Singer sewing-machine magnate – and brother to the famous Winnaretta Singer, Princess of Polignac, a prominent music patron in Paris. Duncan, even back then, in the mid-1910s, was a celebrated American dancer, who had found her greatest acclaim in Europe, becoming for audiences, the ‘high priestess’ of free-form dance.

The couple’s romance was intense but short-lived and filled with bouts of lavish spending and highly publicized episodes of jealously, on his end. Their young son Patrick’s drowning in the Seine, together with Isadora’s daughter Deirdre, was too much for the couple to bear; ultimately, grief consumed and separated them. Yet Paris did indeed build his dream ‘house’ some years before Isadora’s tragic death in Nice, the day her long scarf became entangled in the wheel of her Bugatti. Ironically, just moments before her fatal accident, Isadora had bid farewell to her friends with the famous phrase: “Adieu, mes amis. Je vais à la gloire!”

In the years that followed, the castle became a posthumous tribute to the woman for whom he had once bought a 200-room French hotel to serve as a dance school. Singer’s temple of beauty and art was decorated by several works by the Bottega degli Angeli, a workshop founded by my painter grandfather Federigo Angeli, the family’s progenitor. Paris had given precise instructions: to draw inspiration from Italian ‘styles’ that mirrored the great classical tradition. Not coincidentally, these frescos and other decorative pieces were a nod to antiquity, celebrating the Renaissance mood that had nourished Isadora’s own imagination, strongly informing her dance. I have come to know Singers’ home in Cap Ferrat very well, without ever seeing it in person. Many photographs of the villa, which was destroyed in the Second World War, are found in my family’s archives. Thanks to these commissions, and others that followed because of it, my siblings and I have the Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat castle – and its owner – to thank, in part, for our good fortune of growing up at Villa Il Palmerino, in Florence.

But let’s go back to the beginning. Where did Isadora’s fascination with Italy – and, above all, Florence – come from? When had she become acquainted with the Florentine Renaissance? How was it possible that such a profoundly modern artist – at a time when new aesthetic models were taking hold throughout Europe – thought to look to the body, nature, and classical tradition, as inspiration for a ‘new’ form of dance?

To understand the origins of Isadora’s fascination with Florence, we must go back to 1902, when she arrived in the city with her mother, Mary Gray, and sister Elisabeth. In her memoirs, Duncan recalls those weeks as a time of ecstatic strolls through museums, gardens, and olive groves, but above all, she remembers one experience that would leave a profound mark on her life, namely, her encounter with Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera – The Birth of Spring – on display, at the time, at the Accademia Gallery.

Isadora Duncan’s dance school, at the Neues Palais in Potsdam, operated mostly by Elizabeth Duncan

1926, archive unknown. Source: Wikipedia

“I would sit for days on end in front of La Primavera; I was in love with it,” she wrote many years later. She recounts how an elderly custodian, moved by her adoration, brought her a chair each day, and let her sit in front of the painting until closing time. Isadora would gaze at the figures until they seemed to start moving: the flowers began to bloom and the feet to dance; the bodies began pulsating. It was then she thought: “I shall dance this image; I will convey to others the message of love, Spring, and life that I have received from it.”

Perhaps that was the moment the painting became part of her dancing, definitively. Interestingly, La Primavera was not entirely new to Isadora. Indeed, a reproduction of the painting had been displayed on a bookshelf in her mother’s home in San Francisco. In reality, Botticelli had accompanied Duncan’s imagination since childhood, and in Florence, standing before the original, that image – which she had known only as a faded small-scale reprint – truly came to life.

Isadora did not simply want to imitate Botticelli’s goddess-nymph, but to identify with her, to rediscover in her own body the grace of gesture, the flow of movement, and a connection with nature. For her, the painting became movement and then, movement became image once more. Her dance entitled Primavera emerged from this experience, and she took it all over Europe, until 1909 at least, sharing her vision of dancing freed from the restrictions of academic rigor. Her Florence revelations also deeply influenced her 1903 speech in Berlin, delivered in German, following requests from the press for Isadora to explain the ‘radical philosophies’ underlying her performances, after she’d danced at the Kroll Opera House.

Yet her relationship with Florence was not limited to her Primavera. She would return to the Tuscan capital in 1906, this time with Edward Gordon Craig, the great English set designer and director who had become her life partner and the father of their daughter, Deirdre. The occasion was Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, a play Craig was to stage at the Pergola, starring Eleonora Duse, another extraordinary woman – now known as one of the greatest stage performers of all time. By then, Duse had a well-established career behind her and was acknowledged by Isadora for her great charisma and stage presence. The relationship between the two women is particularly interesting because it did not stem from a genuine collaboration, it grew from the difficult clashes that so often characterize strong personalities. Duse was already a legend of Italian theatre; unlike her contemporaries, she experimented with the psychology of acting, rather than its showmanship, developing the ‘Acting from within’ method.  

Craig was so convinced of his own staging ideas that he refused to bend them to the actress’s demands; Isadora, in love with Craig and convinced of his genius, stepped in and became a mediator in the service of the avant-garde theatrical creation that would define some of their most innovative work.

A recent exhibition on dance in Florence from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, at the Marucelliana Library, ‘Passi di memoria’ or Steps of Memory – co-curated by Caterina Pagnini, Silvia Castelli, Laura Manzoni, and Maria Alberti – clearly documents this story. The curators’ study was based on archival documents from the Placci collection and the Edward Gordon Craig Archive, preserved at the British Institute of Florence, as part of a collection donated by English journalist and editor Dorothy Nevile Lees, who entered into a professional and personal relationship with Craig, after Isadora.

Friedrich August von Kaulbach, Isadora Duncan, in Jugend, a Munich-based weekly magazine, September 1902

Volume 2 (Nos. 27–52) Source: Wikimedia Commons

Through these documents, we find traces of Duncan and her presence in Florence, not only through her performances, but thanks to the efforts of her sister Elizabeth, who was devoted to training others and spreading Isadora’s vision of dance. Among other items, the Craig collection includes a photograph of Elizabeth Duncan’s students at the Maraini residence: an image that vividly illustrates the network through which Isadora’s dancing was shared, and how it took shape in other venues, even those off-stage.

The exhibition’s catalogue emphasizes how the Florentine production of Rosmersholm, staged at La Pergola on 5 December 1906, marked a true transformation of Duse’s stage presence. In Craig’s staging, the curators write, the actress transcends the realistic dimension of the character being played to take on a symbolic and almost oracular quality. Isadora herself was struck by this, describing Duse that evening as a figure who seemed less like Rebecca West and more like a “Delphic Sibyl,” capable of moving across the stage, like a prophetess announcing an extraordinary message.

Her friendship with Duse remained strong, even after her romantic interlude with Edward ended, and the two women’s bond would prove pivotal a few years later, when, following the tragic death of her two children, Duse invited the dancer to Versilia to recover from her grief. There, Isadora was immortalized in Plinio Nomellini’s beautiful painting, as she danced on the beach at Viareggio. Her seaside dance became a quasi-osmotic ritual, involving the element that had taken her children away.

Isadora’s dancing made her a pioneering presence on the Florentine scene, but she was in good company at the time. In fact, numerous dancers followed her lead, bringing a fresh perspective to dance and connecting this art form with other artistic expressions, by taking it outside of theatres and more traditional performance venues. Several of these women are worth noting here: Russian émigrée sisters Marusia and Nada Jartzeff, Italian dancer and choreographer Angiola Sartorio, German avant-garde dancer Charlotte Bara, and American ballerina and theosophist Anieka Leggett – all figures discussed by Luca Scarlini in his performative lecture ‘Nel nome della Stella’ (In the Name of the Star), held at Il Palmerino in the summer of 2026.

Following these pathways, history seems to return to the point from which it began. It is the same with dance: movement moves, expands and advances, charts its own course, and then returns to centre. I look at Isadora’s words as unexpected friends. They made the house in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat – which I had known only through family photographs – come back to me. It is demolished now, but not far away in my mind. Old family pictures continue to recount old stories, now imbued with new meaning. FEDERICA PARRETTI