From The Breakers to Worth Avenue: The Italian Renaissance Reimagined in Gold for Palm Beach’s Finest Interiors
The Italian Renaissance changed forever how the world understands beauty, the human body, light, space and emotion. Centuries later, its visual language is still very much alive. It is not a historical style to copy, but a source of inspiration to reinterpret. Few places in America have embraced Italy as gracefully as Palm Beach. On the ocean, The Breakers was rebuilt in 1926 in the image of Rome's Villa Medici, its ceilings painted by artisans brought from Italy. A few streets away, the courtyards, loggias and fountains of Worth Avenue still carry the Mediterranean dream that Addison Mizner gave the island a century ago.
For the French-American artist and photographer of Italian descent Zack Zublena, the Renaissance becomes a contemporary visual dialogue. Through gold body paint, photography, collage and mixed techniques, he takes classical figures, golden light, mythology and sculptural forms out of their original context and gives them a place in the interiors of today.
Discover the Italian Renaissance collection: works that sit between classical beauty, mythology and golden light.
This approach does not try to recreate Renaissance painting. It asks a different question: what happens when the visual language of the Italian Renaissance is seen through the lens of contemporary fine art photography?
When Photography Meets the Renaissance
The Renaissance was an age of extraordinary experimentation. Artists explored anatomy, perspective, proportion, architecture, mythology and the relationship between the human figure and the space around it.
Across the Intracoastal in West Palm Beach, the Norton Museum of Art carries that spirit into our time. Its collection spans European, American, Chinese and contemporary art, and it has built a remarkable photography collection, so Palm Beach collectors know that the camera can be as serious an artistic tool as the brush. Its 2019 expansion by Norman Foster opened the museum to the Florida light and to a sculpture garden under the trees.
Photography offers another way to explore the same ideas. In Zack Zublena's work, the camera is a tool for building images, not just recording reality. The human figure can look monumental, mysterious, almost architectural. Gold turns skin into something close to gilded sculpture. Shadows create the depth of a fresco.
Archangel Michael, Golden Guardian brings several of these ideas together: the monumental figure, the symbolism of wings and the power of gold. The work speaks to Renaissance iconography while remaining unmistakably contemporary.
Light as a Language
In Renaissance art, light was never just a technical element. It was a language. A face emerging from darkness could become the centre of an entire composition. A hand lit against a shadowed background suddenly became symbolic.
Palm Beach lives in one of the most beautiful lights in America. Think of the sunrise over the Atlantic, the golden afternoons on the Lake Trail and the soft glow of evening over Lake Worth Lagoon. Gold is part of the island's history too. At Whitehall, Henry Flagler's Gilded Age mansion of 1902, now the Flagler Museum, gilded ballrooms and marble halls still shine as they did for the guests of America's first great winter resort. Zack Zublena works with controlled light and deep contrast that give his images an almost painterly quality. The gold recalls gilded frames, Renaissance altarpieces and the glamour of the island's great houses. In photography, it takes on a new physical quality: reflective, atmospheric and contemporary.
Anatomy of the Soul explores the relationship between the human body and the atmosphere around it. The figure stops being the portrait of a specific person. It becomes a study of form, identity and the link between the physical and the symbolic.
The Human Body as Sculpture
One of the strongest connections between the Renaissance and contemporary fine art photography is how they treat the human body. Renaissance artists studied anatomy with extraordinary precision, inspired by the sculpture of antiquity.
Photography approaches the same subject from another direction. Through pose, light, framing and composition, a photographed figure becomes sculptural. Without unnecessary detail, the eye focuses on silhouette, muscle, gesture and empty space. In West Palm Beach, the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens show how powerful that idea can be. Ann Weaver Norton's monumental brick and granite figures rise among palms and tropical gardens, turning the human form into architecture.
Winged Essence takes this idea further. It joins the human figure with wings and a bold visual language of gold and blue, the colours of the Atlantic under a Florida sun. The work recalls religious and mythological imagery without belonging to a single era.
Wings, Myth and the Renaissance Imagination
Wings have lived in the imagination of Western art for centuries. Angels, messengers and allegorical figures fill Renaissance painting and sculpture. In Palm Beach, wings are part of daily life. Brown pelicans glide in formation above the surf, and herons and egrets stand like sculptures along the Intracoastal. The island's gardens, from the Society of the Four Arts to the private estates of the North End, are full of winged figures in stone and bronze.
Wings can also be read in a more abstract way: as an image of freedom, transformation, desire, transcendence, or the longing to go beyond the physical world.
Wings of Desire plays with this symbolic vocabulary. Film lovers will recognise the title of Wim Wenders' classic. Here the wings are far more than ornament. They make the figure ambiguous, suspended between earthly beauty and something almost celestial.
That ambiguity is at the heart of contemporary readings of the Renaissance. The goal is not to imitate the past, but to let its symbols take on new meanings.
A Beauty That Does Not Age
Renaissance images still move us because they see beauty as something bigger than fashion. Their faces, bodies and gestures speak of universal themes: desire, mortality, spirituality, identity, love and the search for meaning.
Symphony of Her Soul approaches the figure through emotion and atmosphere. With its Venetian mask and sheet music, the image creates a contemporary story in which music, movement and the body merge. It evokes an evening with Palm Beach Opera at the Kravis Center, where Verdi and Puccini fill the hall each season. It equally evokes a concert at the Society of the Four Arts, or one of the island's legendary masked galas, where Venetian elegance has always felt at home.
From the Italian Masters to Contemporary Interiors
The great masters of the Renaissance created for architecture: churches, palaces and private residences. Their compositions were designed to speak with the space that held them. Palm Beach was built on that same idea. Its grandest estates were designed by Addison Mizner, Maurice Fatio and Marion Sims Wyeth as Mediterranean villas, where architecture, gardens and art formed a single composition.
Contemporary fine art photography can play the same role. A large-format work becomes an architectural element. It can live in an oceanfront estate on South Ocean Boulevard, a villa in the Estate Section or on El Bravo Way, or a residence on the North End. It suits an apartment above Worth Avenue, a penthouse on Flagler Drive in West Palm Beach, or a home in Manalapan, Jupiter Island or Wellington. It also belongs in a private club, a restaurant on Royal Poinciana Way or the lobby of one of the island's legendary hotels. A monumental figure sets the scale. A restrained palette creates atmosphere. Gold brings warmth and light without overloading the space with colour, in natural dialogue with coral stone, travertine, pecky cypress, linen and the turquoise of the sea.
The Gladiator Philosopher shows this relationship between classical visual language and contemporary interior design. The work carries the monumental presence of classical and Renaissance figures while working as a statement piece for today.
The Renaissance as a Living Language
Perhaps the most interesting way to look at the Italian Renaissance today is not as a closed era, but as a visual language that keeps evolving. That language is made of the human body, dramatic light, mythology, architecture, symbols, gold and gesture. It is also made of the relationship between beauty and emotion.
These elements can be photographed, built digitally, turned into collage and reinterpreted. They can even be deliberately detached from their historical context. Palm Beach is perhaps the most elegant proof of this in America. In the 1920s, Addison Mizner took the villas, cloisters and piazzas of Italy and Spain and reinvented them for the Florida sun. He created the Mediterranean Revival style and the charming vias of Worth Avenue. The Renaissance became a living language here, adapted to palms, ocean breezes and a new way of life.
Serpent of Light introduces another archetypal symbol: the serpent, which since antiquity has stood for transformation, renewal and knowledge. Set against a Pompeii fresco, the work brings together mythology, transformation and mystery. It builds a bridge between ancient imagery and contemporary fine art photography.
The Body, Light and the Classical Ideal
The Renaissance fascination with the human body was deeply tied to the classical world. In Palm Beach, that ideal stands in marble. Whitehall's Grand Hall, designed by Carrère and Hastings, the architects of the New York Public Library, opens with columns, classical statuary and the harmony of proportion that the Renaissance rediscovered from antiquity.
Contemporary photography can revisit this ideal without turning it into an absolute rule. The body becomes material for composition: a line, a silhouette, a volume and a source of light.
Golden Tension explores this relationship through the male figure. The tension between body, light and shadow gives the image a sculptural strength and places it firmly in contemporary fine art photography.
A Meaningful Gift for the Season
Finding the right gift for someone who loves art, design, architecture and beautiful interiors is not easy. A work of art is different. It is not just a gift to unwrap, but a piece that becomes part of a home and keeps its meaning for years.
In Palm Beach, the end of the year marks the start of the Season: homes reopen, friends return from the North, galas fill the calendar and the island glows through the holidays and into the New Year. For those drawn to the beauty of the Italian Renaissance, to classical figures, mythology and golden light, a contemporary fine art photograph inspired by this tradition is a deeply personal choice for the holidays. For collectors in Palm Beach, West Palm Beach, Manalapan, Jupiter or Wellington, it is also a way to bring a piece of European art history into a home designed for the sun.
If you are looking for a unique gift for someone who already has everything, an original work of art can be one of the most personal choices there is.
The Past, Seen Anew
The Italian Renaissance does not need to be recreated to stay relevant. Its ideas can be transformed. Its symbols can be questioned, simplified and reinvented. Its fascination with the human body can become contemporary photography. Its dramatic use of light can become a new atmosphere, and its mythology can be the starting point for entirely new stories.
Through gold, light, bodies, wings, mythology and emotion, Zack Zublena explores this vocabulary. He creates works that look to the past while belonging fully to the present.
Discover the Italian Renaissance collection: contemporary fine art photography inspired by classical beauty, mythology and the timeless visual language of the Renaissance.
