SERIES: The Art Market. Private passions. Beauty all around - Collecting frameworks, in conversation with antiquarians and experts - Under the aegis of Costantino D’Orazio, art historian, in collaboration with the Associazione Antiquari d’Italia
SPEAKERS: Bruno Botticelli and Simone Chiarugi
DATE: Thursday 19 October, 6pm
PLACE: Palazzo Venezia, Sala del Refettorio
In the late 19th century, Italy became the centre of the international antiques market. The fashion for reconstructing Renaissance interiors spread among the great American and European collectors. Together with the masterpieces, paintings and sculptures by the great masters, furnishings and precious objects were eagerly sought after. The Certosina inlaid furniture, the highest expression of cabinetry in the early Renaissance, were almost impossible to find. The antique dealers of the time, Bardini and Volpi in the lead, competed for the finest furnishings and their skilled restorers did not hesitate at times to partly counterfeit some of them.
Since then, a knowledge of the technical aspects and a method of objective study of the restoration and conservation of these works that were so important in the decorative arts has progressively been lost
Born in 1965 in Florence, after art school he entered his family’s gallery in 1985, assisting his father Franco, an antique dealer and restorer since 1959.
He works with his sister Eleonora, studying and valorising European sculptures, furniture and paintings from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. He has worked with art historians and scholars to extend lesser-known aspects of the art world, publishing catalogues and research.
He exhibited at the International Biennale in Florence, continuing a family tradition begun in 1960 and at the Tefaf in Maastricht since 2014.
He is also on the board of directors of the Biennale di Palazzo Corsini and in January 2022 he had the honour of chairing the Associazione Antiquari d’Italia.
Art historian and restorer. After initial studies of the history of furniture in the 18th and 19th centuries, he then turned his interests to Italian Renaissance furniture, relating it to the development of the antiques market in the late 19th century and the complex issue of forgeries. Technical knowledge has made it possible to clarify the history of numerous furnishings preserved in well-known public collections and museums in Italy and abroad. He completed the catalogue of furnishings at the Museo Bagatti Valsecchi in Milan (1999-2003), the Museo del Bargello (manuscript 2007) and the Museo Davanzati (2016) in Florence. He is currently investigating a large body of 15th-century chests associated with the Florentine antiquarian Stefano Bardini (1836-1922).
Admission free subject to availability.
