Right before my eyes, on the most accessible shelf of my library, is the first of the chronological series of twenty-four volumes containing the catalogue of the International Antiques Fair of 1959. It was here, almost half a century ago, that the history of the Florentine Biennale began.
Let’s dwell for a minute on that date: 1959. The memories of the war were still fresh; you needed a passport to go to France, the Treaty of Rome was just two years old, and Stalin had been dead for just six. Italy was still largely a land of peasants and emigrants, although the first faint signs of the phenomenon that the historians were to call the “economic miracle” were just beginning to emerge.
The small format catalogue is of a sober and modest appearance. It makes us smile if compared to the lavish art publications of today. The photos are mostly in black and white, only five in colour. A humble publication, with a vague post-war tinge. The introductory text by Piero Bargellini (printed moreover in four languages: Italian, English, French and German) gravitates around the rhetorical invention of Mercury, the god of money and business, and of Apollo, the god of beauty. The idea was far from banal; effectively Bargellini was never banal, even in compositions of circumstance, and more than anything he was a perfect example of the average culture of the “elite” of 59: people who had attended the good schools of the past, and were still able to appreciate a nice mythological metaphor.
Now let’s take a look at the first few pages of the ’59 catalogue. We are immediately struck by the contrast between the modesty of the publication and the importance of the event that the book illustrates. Over a hundred exhibitors crowded the rooms of Palazzo Strozzi forty-eight years ago, at least half of them foreigners. There were twenty-eight French dealers, four Germans, eight Dutch, three Americans and as many English, as well as antiquarians from Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden etc…. A total of 54 foreign exhibitors as opposed to the 56 Italians.
In 1959 the two general secretaries Giuseppe and Mario Bellini had attracted to Florence the very best of the international art market. Beyond this, in the city of Stefano Bardini and Elia Volpi, they had hit upon the inspired model that was destined in the years to come to multiply and scatter to the four corners of Italy and of Europe: from Parma to Maastricht, and from Milan to Paris. Nevertheless, despite being pressed and threatened by fierce competition, and even though spreading wealth and the democracy of consumption profoundly altered the make-up of society, and the culture, tastes and inclinations of the new customers, over the years and in the decades that followed the Florentine Biennale remained an essential appointment for everyone in the world who believed in the felicitous encounter between Money and Beauty: between Mercury and Phoebus Apollo, as Bargellini wrote in ’59.
There are twenty-four catalogues relating to the Fairs held between 1959 and 2005, an appointment that was never cancelled despite the tragedies that struck the city in the second half of the twentieth century: the flood of 1966 and the car bomb attack in Via dei Georgofili in 1993. If we take them all together, those twenty-four catalogues represent a museum: an immense, variegated and volatile museum that, over the span of half a century, has invaded Florence regularly like a beneficial flood. Every Fair generated business and money while at the same time nourishing collecting, refining taste, stimulating studies of an historic and artistic nature, enhancing the indices and the repertories with new materials. Leafing through the catalogues of the Fairs we discern how the approaches of the critics, the sensitivity of the buyers and the moods of the market have altered over time. We also realise that the so-called “artistic professions” (from “connoisseurship” to museography and restoration) would not exist were it not for the antiquarians who select, propose and valorise the works. They nourish the private collection so that, one day, it may become a public collection.
The twenty-four volumes that document the story of the Florentine Bienniale Fairs are a treasure trove of material and information, and there is no specialised institute or professional academic who is unaware of this. In little less than fifty years, many thousands of “objects” and several hundred masterpieces have passed through these pages. It is this simple and elementary consideration, combined with what I said above about the role played by Palazzo Strozzi over the last half century, that gave the Secretary General Giovanni Pratesi his idea: that of creating a publication, to mark the 2007 Biennale, dealing with all the best that has passed through the rooms of the Florentine Fair over its twenty-four editions: paintings and sculptures, furnishings and accessories and exemplars of the applied arts.
Clearly, this will be a partial and subjective selection, as selections inevitably are. It will serve to convey the quality and importance of the extraordinary museum that Florence has hosted in its Biennale Fairs, and above all to underscore the precious and unrivalled cultural role played by the art market.
