The identities of the absentees from the guest list will perhaps have escaped the attention of Prince Albert II.
No more than two-and-a-half hours separate us when he is in Monte Carlo and I am in the Var. We share a liking for football. I was in Monaco to cover the final illness and then the funeral of his father, Prince Rainier, for The Daily Telegraph and have written fairly regularly on other occasions about the principality.
But SAS (Son Altesse sérénissime) and I are not especially close. All communication has tended to be perfunctory, from formal, all-round press releases sent out by his palace to terse rejections - press office again - of requests for interviews.
All the same, we were due to find ourselves in each other's company, in its broadest sense, when the Czech sculptress Anna Chromy's powerful work, The Cloak of Conscience in Carrar marble, was recently inaugurated by him in the gardens of the Grimaldi Forum. You see them together, to the left of the sculpture, in the photograph above. I could not, in the end, make it because of a family visit to us in France.
Apologies once again to Frédéric Pont, from La Galerie Continental Art-Fair at Saint Jean Cap Ferrat, who had invitations whisked to Monsieur and Mme Salut after our chance encounter a couple of weeks earlier.
And congratulations to Anna Chromy, who tells the story of the sculpture at her own site -
http://cloak.annachromy.com/featured/anna-and-the-cloak/ - better than I could here. The Cloak is already seen inside the royal palace, but in bronze.
Frédéric tells me it was a marvellous presentations with a "formidable" speech by the prince. Monseigneur Barsi, archbishop of Monaco, blessed the sculpture watched by assoeted dignitaries from each side of the France-Monaco border (figuratively speaking since there is no obvious frontier beyond road signs).
Chromy switched from surrealistic oil paintings to sculpture more than 20 years ago after an accident.
The original of The Cloak, carved in pure white Carrara marble, weighs 45 tonnes (or is it 70? I have seen both weights cited) and stands 4.7 metres high on its plinth. It won her the Premio Michelangelo, an annual award for sculpture, in 2008. She describes her aim was to create "the physical image of harmony: harmony between man, nature and all created".
The 1.3m high version inaugurated in the Grimaldi Forum gardens was donated to Monaco by the Club Allemand International. Frédéric urges me to take time to view it when next in the mini-state and I shall.
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