An instructive exhibition dedicated to all those contemporary art collectors who are inflating the bubble

 

The upcoming exhibition “The fortunes of the primitives” (at the Galleria dell’Accademia, in Florence, from June 24 to December 8) is, for various reasons, of great interest to Conceptual Fine Arts, particularly in relation with the upcoming new session of highly speculative contemporary art auctions.

 

The main point of interest is that the exhibition offers an insight on the cultural history of taste and collecting. in this case, in Italy, from the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. As the curators say, the time is now ripe for reasoning about this phenomenon and especially on those who systematically collected (not just so occasionally) the primitives, and not least of all those who endeavored to procure such boards and precious gold funds (merchants, agents, brokers, restorers). To identify Florence as a privileged place for this exhibition is almost a foregone conclusion, for the richness that the area of Tuscany and Florence has had historically in the production of works and Three Fifteenth-Century: almost all collections of primitive works boasted in fact from this geographical area.

 

CFA makes every day a thorough research on emerging talents in contemporary art, including in relation to collecting. Similarly, is concerned, therefore, the Primitives, which can be considered “emerging Old Masters”, or artists of the past very valid and to be rediscovered.

 

Among the artists on display are, however, some very well known to the general public, and which form the vertices of the Italian figurative culture between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, such as il Maestro della Maddalena, Arnolfo di Cambio, Bernardo Daddi, Taddeo Gaddi, Nardo di Cione, Lippo Memmi, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Pietro da Rimini, il Beato Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Andrea Mantegna, Cosmè Tura, Piermatteo d’Amelia and Giovanni Bellini.

 

Another fact that ties the exhibit to the interests of CFA is that it has as its starting point the book “The fortune of primitives. By Vasari to Neoclassical, “published in Turin in 1964. It was written by Giovanni Previtali, and it was the extension of a thesis discussed at the University of Florence in 1956. Well, it is no coincidence that Previtali’s teachers were two of the most important Italian art historians: Roberto Longhi, known for his pioneering studies, and Francesco Arcangeli, the one who can be considered a precursor to CFA. In his lectures, in fact, Archangels showed the connections between the works of Jackson Pollock and Wiligelmo; or explained how the representation of space in the works of Piero della Francesca (for example, “The Flagellation” of Urbino) was comparable to the geometric grids of Piet Mondrian.

 

More generally, the exhibition is also an opportunity to remind once again that creativity, market and public heritage should always be considered as the three elements connected to each other and not independent. Do not forget, though, that the changes in taste and rediscoveries have a significant and direct influence on the formation of any art collection.

September 22, 2014