Dealing with old masters: Where tradition still has a future

HOpening a large old master gallery in the British capital today shows confidence in the market segment and its historically most important location. And Fabrizio Moretti has both: “There will always be a demand for great Old Masters, and London will remain the center of the international art world alongside New York,” says the Italian emphatically. Collectors, curators and dealers from all over the world continue to come regularly to the Thames metropolis. Moretti, who opened his first gallery in Florence in 1999 and whose father was also an art dealer, moved his company’s headquarters to London in 2005. Since 2017 he has also maintained exhibition spaces in Monaco. In early July, the Moretti Gallery in London moved into large new premises in the St. James’s district, between Christie’s and the Royal Academy, just in time for the summer edition of the biannual London Art Week and the concurrent Old Masters auctions of the major auction houses.

In his mid-forties, Moretti is one of the young talents in the old-master market, where most dealers and buyers are a generation older. The next generation of collectors for European Old Masters is growing slowly but steadily: “In America, in the Middle East, also in Asia,” explains Moretti. “Customers often start with contemporary art and then look backwards in history.” The focus of his gallery is on Italian paintings and sculptures from the 14th to 18th centuries – and expressly on museum quality. The gallery owner at the new address can offer her the appropriate setting.

Stepping through the narrow Duke Street front door, typical of old shop buildings in the historic Art District, one unexpectedly finds oneself in a light-filled, two-story foyer, which can be seen down from the first-floor exhibition space. A masterpiece of Venetian rococo hangs in this spacious entrance: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s “Madonna of the Rosary with Angels”, created in 1735, the last altarpiece by the artist still in private ownership. A proud 246 centimeters high, the work would not have found space on any wall before the gallery building was gutted and merged with a neighboring house.

Tiepolo’s imposing Maria in a red dress has long been quite at home in London, having been auctioned here several times within the British market between the 1820s and 1980s. However, her current owner bought her at Sotheby’s in New York two years ago for $17.34 million plus premium. Now she has been entrusted to Fabrizio Moretti for sale and one hopes for something more. The international market for quality Italian Old Masters revolves around works that have long been outside their country of origin, as obtaining a license to export from Italy is next to impossible.

Top prices as claim

The interior of the five-storey building, from the exhibition area to the offices and the library in the vaulted cellar, is contemporary elegant, with light gray walls, oak floors and an intimate presentation room lined with dark gray velvet. There are devotional pictures from the 14th and early 15th centuries in atmospheric lighting, including a Resurrection by Jacopo di Cione for 350,000 euros and a depiction of the Nativity by the Sienese Sano di Pietro (900,000). In the main room, Moretti is showing Canaletto’s “Venice: The Churches of the Redentore and San Giacomo” (five million) alongside three academic nude studies by Ubaldo Gandolfi (210,000 in the set) and works by Massimiliano Soldani Benzi and Fra Bartolomeo.

The claim to operate in the top price segment is underscored by the fact that in July Moretti brought Letizia Treves, the long-standing curator for Italian and Spanish Baroque and Rococo art at the London National Gallery, as a partner to his gallery. Sales to institutions play an important role for Moretti, who has already sold works to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Museo di San Marco in Venice, the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum.