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Art & Antiques Venice |
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Venice is a city of arts, where the trade of artistic and superb handicrafts is alive, already five or six centuries ago we found these ones. A professional antique dealer starts his business as a collector.It seems that Venice was the first town where important art collections started and developed: ancient statues, medals, paintings, books, engravings and more.The collectors requested new pieces in order to make more numerous their collections and for this purpose, they needed suppliers who might find these objects by means of knowledge, cleverness and culture.In Venice being an art collector was considered a good quality  for the man who devoted himself to this activity and it could also favour him in his public jobs. That is why all business connected with art and its trade were considered so highly.Actually Venice saw beginning of private collections much earlier than anywhere else in Italy and Europe; it also seems that during the seventeenth century Venice had the only government which institute a "magistate for the arts". The artistic life of the last century of the history of the Republic of Venice, the eighteenth, provides us the names of some arts merchants. Among the names worth mentioning, the English consul Joseph Smith, patron and client of the painter Canaletto, who dealt in books and paintings during his Venetian visits.After his death, his widow sold important paintings of the Venetian School, a collection of books and a collection of cameos to   the King of England. His brother-in-law, Mr. Murray, took his place as consul of England in Venice and he also went on the same activity as a merchant. His palace in S.Giobbe was full of paintings, most of which he brought with him when he returned to his own country. Other officials of foreign countries devoted themselves to the activity of art dealing, but actually there was also a lot of Italian intermediaries, speculators, agents and antiques. With the collapse of the Serenissima in 1797, there was a loss of a huge patrimony, unique in quantity, artistic value and richness. The new established order issued many decrees in order to suppress first and then to demolish the Schools, the churches and monasteries, besides it started the decay of the big families and mansions; these things filled the market with a huge mass of artistic products and precious handicrafts. |
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