Brightening up the sitting room fireplace mantel is a scarlet fragment of a Pompeian fresco from about 79 AD. Nearby, a classical Greek marble torso rests on a table opposite from a wooden Ming goddess from China. Across the hall in the living room, “Man Sinking,” a painting by British painter Francis Bacon, flanks a Chinese wooden horse and camel carved around 600 AD. Visible on the terrace outside the windows are painted wooden figures from Orissa, India.
At the back of the garden, a large sculpture, coated in glossy automotive paint, was created by daughter Mara, an up-and-coming New York artist. Its shape, based on a protein-producing sub cellular structure called a ribosome, pays homage to her father’s groundbreaking work.