From 4 July to 23 August 2026, in the Bardini Garden, the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation and the CR Firenze Foundation are presenting ‘The Briar Rose’, a work by the French artist Jean-Marie Appriou. The initiative is linked to ‘CANTO INFINITO’, Appriou’s solo exhibition currently on display in the Project Space at the Palazzo Strozzi.
The bronze sculpture The Briar Rose at the Bardini Gardens is inspired by Edward Burne-Jones’s series of paintings The Legend of Briar Rose, dedicated to the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. The artist reinterprets the bramble thicket as a symbolic threshold: the flowers, intertwined with thorny branches, create an image that combines beauty and danger, both inviting and at the same time keeping the observer at a distance. By evoking the image of barbed wire, Appriou offers a meditation on the boundaries that define the contemporary experience.
