Can’t you choose between Sp Arte, Art Dallas and MiArt? Question 400-year-old dealer Daniel Nijs
Today more than ever art fairs are the ultimate celebration of the art market and dealers. In the occasion of the recently inaugurated 2015 editions of SP Arte, miArt and Dallas Art – all of them taking place in this same week, while Art Cologne is going to open next Thursday – we would like to focus on one particular art dealer in history, one that’s been called the greatest and perhaps the most adventurous of the seventeenth century: the Flemish merchant of Venice, Daniel Nijs.
As reported by historian Christina M. Anderson, Daniel Nijs was born in 1572 in an exiled family coming from today’s Belgium. He moved to Venice in 1590 to take over his cousins’ business and by 1615 he had amassed a fortune dealing art. This is the moment when his name and collection are mentioned with flattering words by the great architect Vincenzo Scamozzi in his treatise, in which he refers to Nijs as a honourable and gentle man and praises his “portico” (what today we would call an art gallery) with its 80 paintings, various drawings, 120 between marble statues and busts, miniatures, enamels and precious stones stored in a remarkable ebony cabinet. As the historians report, Scamozzi’s tribute might have to do with a loan Nijs guaranteed for him, confirming his role as a patron for artists and intellectuals besides that of art dealer (also from 1615 is a poem on painting dedicated to him by writer Giulio Cesare Gigli).
Most of the artworks he was dealing at the time specialised in Italian and Netherlandish drawings from the 15th and 16th century along with ancient marble statues which he had purchased from Venetian and Padovani patricians. He was however interested in the golden age of Venetian oil painting as well and a delivery of 15 paintings including works by Tintoretto, Veronese and Titian was reported shipped to an English client in 1615.
It was still for the crown of England that he carried out his most daring trade, which misfortunately forced his business into bankruptcy and set him to a definite departure from Venice. Active as a link between the Serenissima and the Gonzaga family, Nijs had gained their trust and was then able to actively participate in the sale of their important collection to Charles I of England that begun in 1628. Both the undecidedness from the Italian side and the insolvency from the English one proved lethal for Nijs’ Venetian business. When creditors acquired his gallery in 1631, they found a stock of paintings by artists such as Raphael and Titian besides a great collection of marble statues (including some by Michelangelo) and drawings (including some by Albrecht Durer)
Indebted and out of business, Nijs moved to England in the same year where he partially managed to reestablish his name before dying in London in 1647.
Perhaps the best memory of Daniel Nijs survives in some of the verses Gigli dedicated to him at the peak of his fame:
On his portrait
this honourable aspect
seized is by the scalpel
yet his noble heart’s worth
no muted image can express
November 25, 2020
