A photographic editorial by Animica Portraits · Official Rochas Store Ambassador for Italy
There is a private island in the Venice lagoon where time behaves differently. Where luxury makes no noise.
Where art meets skin, and skin meets light.
The island of San Clemente is not the kind of place one stumbles upon. Ten minutes by boat from Piazza San Marco, San Clemente Palace is a five-star resort occupying an entire private island — a 12th-century monastery, restored in every detail until it became one of the most exclusive addresses in the Veneto. Eighty thousand square metres of historic gardens, a Romanesque chapel, 196 rooms and suites overlooking the lagoon, awarded by Condé Nast Traveller as the Best Hotel in Venice. Not a hotel: a world unto itself.
This is where Animica Portraits chose to photograph Sigrid de Montrond.
Some are born gallerists. Others become gallerists through Venice. Sigrid de Montrond belongs to the second category — hers is the story of a woman who allowed La Serenissima to transform her.
Parisian by birth, a costume designer by training, an interior decorator by vocation, she discovered Venice in 1988 during Carnival — when she was still sewing lace and velvet for the masks of the night. It was love at first sight that never faded. In 2003, together with her architect husband Xavier de Montrond, she acquired Palazzo Bragadin: five hundred square metres in the heart of Venice, destined to become a permanent space for cultural exchange between Paris and the lagoon.
Today Sigrid runs two galleries: Atelier Visconti, in Paris in the 6th arrondissement (rue Visconti, Saint-Germain-des-Prés), and the Venetian palazzo — both nodes in an international artistic circuit that spans the Biennale, the Venice Film Festival, and the most exclusive salons of European high society.
But it is through Murano glass that Sigrid has reached her most personal dimension. Salvaging fragments of antique chandeliers that had rested in silence for decades, she has transformed them into monumental necklaces, unique objects on the boundary between sculpture and jewellery. The “Luce di Murano” collection — which also lends its name to this shoot — is now worn by the most refined collectors in Europe.
Countess. Gallerist. Creator. And today, through her Murano glassworks, a fashion designer under the Atelier Visconti label: each necklace is a unique, incomparable piece, handcrafted with Venetian artisan mastery. Her garments follow the same philosophy: stage elements that tell a story.
Every Animica photographic session has an olfactory soul. For this editorial, photographer Barbara Pigazzi chose Nocturnal by Rochas — one of the fragrances of the Parisian maison that Animica Portraits officially represents in Italy as Official Store Ambassador.
Nocturnal does not smell of daylight. It smells of those hours when one lowers one’s guard, when one is truly oneself without mediation. It was the only possible fragrance for Sigrid de Montrond: a woman who has always chosen authenticity in life, even when authentic meant unconventional. Rochas and Sigrid share the same root — Paris, elegance that does not shout, luxury that tells stories.
The photographs taken at San Clemente Palace carry this fragrance visually: in the shadows across the gardens, in the backlight over the lagoon, in the close-up details of Murano glass catching and reflecting the light.
In the gardens of San Clemente Palace, among the pheasants that inhabit the island and the eighty thousand square metres of historic greenery, stands one of the most extraordinary works of the Biennale Arte 2026: Mirror Gate II, by Argentine artist Pilar Zeta, produced by Marmonil from exceptional Egyptian stones — luminous yellow alabaster, red Aswan granite, Breccia Fawakhir.
Pilar Zeta — a multidisciplinary artist whose work has already entered into dialogue with the Pyramids of Giza and then with the courtyard of the Louvre in Paris — builds portals. Sacred geometries, archaic proportions, forms that belong to no single era but to all of them. Mirror Gate is not merely sculpture: it is a threshold. One passes through it with one’s eyes, with one’s body, and each passage changes something.
📎 Read our in-depth feature: Mirror Gate II by Pilar Zeta at the Venice Biennale 2026
The project is curated by Stéphane Ruffier-Meray, gallerist and curator, one of the key figures of the Franco-Venetian art scene — and a long-standing collaborator of Sigrid de Montrond across numerous exhibitions between Paris and the lagoon.
Barbara Pigazzi’s photographs place Sigrid in dialogue with the work: the countess before the portal, Murano glass reflecting ancient stones, the lagoon as backdrop. Two worlds of handcraft — sculpture and jewellery — recognising each other.
The colliers worn by Sigrid de Montrond in the photographs are not accessories: they are the very essence of her creative work. Each piece is built by hand in her Murano glassworks, assembling fragments of antique Venetian chandeliers into compositions that are simultaneously baroque and thoroughly modern. Unique pieces, costly, unrepeatable — in the literal sense: each piece of glass has a history, and once incorporated into a necklace, that history cannot be replicated.
The garments that accompany them belong to the same aesthetic: pieces conceived by Sigrid as extensions of her artistic vision, where fabric and glass converse without overpowering one another.
Atelier Visconti is the name that brings it all together — the Parisian gallery, the Venetian glassworks, the fashion creations — into a single signature recognised across the world of high culture and international fashion.
This editorial is not merely the documentation of an extraordinary encounter. It is the signature of a positioning.
Animica Portraits, Barbara Pigazzi’s photography studio based on Giudecca, Venice, is the Official Rochas Store Ambassador for Italy.
A role that goes beyond the commercial: it means bringing the aesthetic and olfactory universe of one of the most iconic Parisian maisons — founded in 1925, always at the frontier between auteur perfumery and haute couture — into a photographic and cultural context of the highest level. That is what Animica builds with every editorial: not a showcase, but a narrative.
The photographic session at San Clemente Palace is its most complete expression: Rochas as an invisible fil rouge, Sigrid de Montrond as protagonist, Venice as natural scenography.
Barbara Pigazzi’s photographs are not portraits. They are human landscapes: the subject is always at the centre, but the context inhabits rather than confines. At San Clemente Palace, the lagoon light enters obliquely between the cypresses and the walls of the former convent. The colours are those of Venetian water: cerulean, pearl grey, antique gold.
Sigrid de Montrond in these images is perfectly herself: no constructed pose, no distance between the person and the persona. The countess, the gallerist, the creator — they are the same woman.
And the Murano glass, at her throat and in her hands, is alive as ever. As though the antique lamps it came from were still illuminating something.
© Animica Portraits · Ph. Barbara Pigazzi · Leica SL2 e Leica Q3 (Officially Certified Photographer – Certified by Leica)
Venice, 18 June 2026
Animica Portraits is Official Rochas Store Ambassador for Italy.
Wearing: Atelier Visconti (necklaces and garments by Sigrid de Montrond)
Location: San Clemente Palace, Venice
Works on display: Mirror Gate II — Pilar Zeta / Marmonil · curated by Stéphane Ruffier-Meray
Fragrance: Nocturnal · Rochas
Interested in Booking A shoot?
Click below to Learn More & to schedule your Complimentary consultation!
You cannot copy content of this page
Fill in all the fields, send the request and wait to be contacted by our staff for confirmation.
