Franco Rubartelli and Veruschka

Sometimes the relationship between an artist and his or her muse is personal as well as professional. Irving Penn, for example, married Lisa Fonssagrives after meeting her on a shoot for Vogue.

Another affair of the heart that was documented on the pages of the magazine was that between the dashing Italian photographer Franco Rubartelli and the German model Veruschka (née Vera von Lehndorff) who Richard Avedon called “the most beautiful woman in the world,” (a sentiment he elaborated on—in words and pictures—over ten pages of Vogue’s May 1972 issue).

Veruschka made her debut in Vogue about a year before Rubartelli, a self-taught lensman did. At the time he was married to Françoise Rubartelli.

Soon after they split. Rubartelli met Veruschka by chance; he was at a hotel waiting for a client, when the leggy model walked in.

He finagled a way to meet her and that was it: “We spent the rest of that night and every successive night together for nearly nine years,” Rubartelli told Vogue. “It was love at first sight.”

Theirs was a jet-setting, peripatetic relationship that took them all over the globe, often with Giorgio Sant'Angelo in tow as the stylist. 

He was responsible for wrapping Veruschka like a mummy in a famous story photographed in Arizona’s arid Painted Desert. Veruschka’s movements were rarely constricted, though.

These color saturated images are about freedom and exploration, and many have a sort of luxe boho-vibe, sometimes bordering on exoticism.

Rubartelli and Veruschka followed the first two parts of Timothy Leary’s m.o.: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Part of the hippie ethos was opening oneself to different cultures and belief systems—it was in 1968 that the Beatles went to India to study transcendental meditation. 

Some of what was understood as cultural appreciation then, might be considered appropriation now.