AHEADOFTIMES FROM OLD MASTERS TO MODERN ITALIANS · particularly Caravaggesque and Baroque painting, and which has developed a AHEADOFTIMES For Robilant + Voena, an Unlikely Mix of

FROM OLD MASTERS

TO MODERN ITALIANS

BY NINA SIEGAL

114

David Lachapelle, “Statue,” 2008,

C-print, 243.2 x 181.6cm,

Edition of 5.

It’s been a banner year for Robilant + Voena, the international art gallery run by Edmondo di Robilant and Marco Voena in London, Milan and St. Moritz.

Within the last 12 months, they sold “David” by Claude Vignon to

the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a portrait of Prince Camillo Borghese by the French painter François-Pascal-Simon Gérard to the Frick collection in New York. In March, they showed up at TEFAF with a truly

rare find: a Renaissance pietre dure table designed by Giorgio Vasari for Francesco I de’Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany in the 16th Century — one of the highlights of the fair.

None of these were particularly characteristic items to come through Robilant + Voena, which was founded in London in 2000, formerly as Dover Street Gallery, with an initial focus on Italian Old Masters, particularly Caravaggesque and Baroque painting, and which has developed a

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For Robilant + Voena, an Unlikely Mix of Genres Is a Winning Combination

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secondary specialization in Italian Modern art along the way.

“It’s like anything, it’s opportunism,” said Di Robilant in a telephone interview, of the Medici table. “If you come across something that is absolutely extraordinary, even if it’s not in your field, and if you’re not a complete idiot then you can see that it’s great, you try to get your hands on it. If it’s that exceptional, you don’t need someone else to market it for you, it speaks for itself.”

Luckily, the gallery is in the rather unusual position to be able to sell almost anything the

dealers come across, in part because of its strong reputation for sourcing museum-quality work with sterling provenances, but also because they have struck a balance between old and new blue-chip art, at a time when top art collectors are increasingly adventitious in their tastes.

Today, Robilant + Voena is considered one of the world’s most prominent art dealers, and owns two 50,000-square-foot galleries in both London’s Mayfair district and central Milan, and a third on a promenade of luxury designer stores in St. Moritz. A staff of about 20 helps them mount about 10 exhibitions a year and show at another 10 art fairs, including Frieze Masters, Art Basel Miami Beach and TEFAF, in both Maastricht and

New York.While its aim is to “become a brand in

Italian art from old masters to moderns,” according to Voena, the gallery has a range of other offerings, including unlikely outliers such as Julian Schnabel paintings and photographs by David Lachapelle, and the occasional absolutely extraordinary item of applied arts.

(They had not yet sold the Medici table in early April; they would not disclose the asking price of the table, except to say that it was “less than half the price of the Badminton Cabinet,” which sold at Christie’s London in 2004 for $36.6 million).

Di Robilant and Voena met each other in the 1990s when they were both working in the auction world, and both dealing in Italian Old Masters. Voena is an art historian and he was living in Italy, where he was sourcing a lot of material that he wanted to sell internationally. Di Robilant, who is actually an Italian count, was born in Italy and had connections to old Italian noble families. He moved to London at age 13 to go to boarding school. He had plenty of clients in London, but difficulty sourcing good material from Italy to sell in London.

They worked together on a number of sales, exhibitions and fairs until 2000, when they decided to officially partner up as a firm.

“In the old days we used to make quite a lot of discoveries and tended not to talk about it,” said Di Robilant, “because if you find something and buy it for very little money and then sell it for a lot more, people don’t seem to like it very much.”

Without getting into specifics he said that some of the early discoveries included finding an Artemisia Gentileschi and a Caravaggio, and selling a very important Franz Xaver Winterhalter, a German society portraitist, to an American museum. Over the years, estimates Voena, they’ve sold works to at least 50 museums across the globe, from the

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Di Robilant and Voena met each other in the 1990s

when they were both working in the auction world

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Edmondo di Robilant and Marco Voena.



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Julian Schnabel, “Untitled (Chinese Painting),” 2008, spraypaint, ink, resin and oil on polyester, 274.3 x 243.8 cm.

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Metropolitan Museum of Art to the the Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.

There have also been dark moments. In 2006, they acquired a Baroque masterpiece by Bernardo Strozzi from Open Care, a company in Milan that offers art-related services, according to the Los Angeles Times. Three years later, they were informed that the work had been looted by the Nazis in 1944, and they returned it to the rightful owners, the heirs of the American art historian and collector Charles A. Loeser. They later donated it to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Robilant + Voena suffered about 450,000 euros in losses, according to the LA Times. They said that they had been completely unaware of this tainted history.

“In Italy, it’s a complete one-off, because it’s not like Germany, Austria, France or the Netherlands, where 9 out of the 10 Nazi looting cases take place,” said De Robilant. “We didn’t know things like this happened. Obviously, we learned our lesson.”

Another difficulty they’ve experienced has to do with export licenses for historical Italian art.

“It’s basically a roulette game,” said Di Robilant. “It depends on the day. You have to understand that there are about 20 export offices in Italy, with a customs agent in each one. This man wakes up in a bad mood on a Tuesday and he bars the export; that man had a nice morning with his wife and he gives you an export license. We have seen no consistency in why things get out or why things don’t get out.”

In part because of these difficulties, and a waning interest among collectors for Old Masters, about five years into their partnership, they started to exhibit Italian Modern artists such as Lucio Fontana, Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni.

Beginning in 2011, they tried presenting solo exhibitions of the lesser-known Italian Modern artists, with still lifes by Giorgio Morandi and Italian post-war Neo-Renaissance artists such as Agostino

Bonalumi and Paolo Scheggi. These were accompanied by deeply researched catalogs, and sometimes co-curated with museums or estate collections, helping to find new buyers for these works.

Di Robilant feels that this was the major turning point for the gallery, and part of its strength today. “The opportunity to mix old master and Modern, especially in the fairs that have allowed us to do so, has certainly given us an edge vis-a-vis galleries who just do one thing,” he said.

“I think we were fortunate enough to see that we couldn’t really grow in old masters particularly and that we needed to find another outlet for our energies,” said Di Robilant. “These sales put us on the map for the Modern, and we had already been on the map for Old Masters, and so it doubled our opportunity for market.”

Baron François Gérard (1770–1837),“Portrait of Camillo Borghese,”1810,oil on canvas,framed: 95 3/8 × 66 × 4 1/4 in. (242.3 × 167.6 × 10.8 cm).



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AHEADOFTIMES FROM OLD MASTERS TO MODERN ITALIANS · particularly Caravaggesque and Baroque painting, and which has developed a AHEADOFTIMES For Robilant + Voena, an Unlikely Mix of