The artist who lived inside a giant sculpture

A tarot figure built to be entered

At the Tarot Garden in Tuscany, Niki de Saint Phalle turned tarot imagery into monumental, walk-through sculpture. The Empress—an enormous sphinx-like figure—was not simply an object to view from the path: its body enclosed space where the artist could live while the garden was being made.

That shift from sculpture to shelter changes how the work reads. The figure’s mirrored breasts catch and fragment the surrounding garden, while their interior belongs to the practical world of rooms and daily life. A visitor sees a fantastical surface; the artist experienced the structure from within.

When the artwork became a home

The garden took roughly two decades to build, so the Empress was part of an extended process rather than a finished attraction arriving all at once. Living inside the sculpture brought the artist’s everyday presence into the project’s architecture. The place where she slept and worked was also one of the garden’s most striking images.

The result makes the Tarot Garden feel less like a collection of statues arranged for a quick visit and more like a world being inhabited and assembled. Its central idea is literal: here, a work of art could be large enough to step into—and, for a time, to call home.