Refined, people-friendly and well-organized. Gian Enzo Sperone promotes the BIAF

During the press preview of the XXXII edition of the BIAF - Biennale Internazionale dell’Antiquariato di Firenze, and now open to the public until October 2, 2022 in the halls of Palazzo Corsini, we had the opportunity to ask Gian Enzo Sperone, one of the most important gallery owners of the last fifty years internationally and owner of Sperone Westwater Gallery in New York, for a comment on this edition of the world’s oldest market-exhibition.

"The Florence Biennale dell’Antiquariato is the finest fair there is in Italy,“ Sperone comments enthusiastically. ”It also has the right size, not like TEFAF in Maastricht, which takes three days to visit; BIAF is on a human scale and then it is elegant because it is housed in a beautiful palace and is well organized.“ ”However, there is a plan to change it from a biennial to an annual, and this would create problems for antiquarians to find ’fresh’ merchandise," he adds.

As for the public, “we still don’t know if there will be an international audience this year, after the impossibility of visiting the fair in attendance due to the pandemic, however, looking at the number of tourists on the street I hope they will come here as well.”

On the quality of the Biennale, Gian Enzo Sperone confesses that he personally enjoys it very much and always finds very interesting things to buy. “Selling comes later,” he adds. “I have already sold one work, though, and personally I have already bought another one, a work by Landi.”

In fact, Sperone bought Gaspare Landi ’s painting depicting Antiochus and Stratonice from the Carlo Orsi Gallery, his opposite number at BIAF 2022. It is an oil on canvas discovered by scholar Gian Lorenzo Mellini, who called the work a “linguistically Canova-like painting” and “superior to what is known to us of the painter Canova.” A masterpiece of neoclassical art in which is depicted an episode from Plutarch’s Life of Demetrius, where it tells of the love between Antiochus I, ruler of the Seleucid empire, and his father’s second wife, Stratonice: a love that consumed Antiochus to the point of making him ill. Landi depicts in the painting, with certain narrative emphasis, Antiochus lying on his bed with the physician Erasistratus beside him, who points to Stratonice as the cause of Antiochus’ illness.

The work sold by the Sperone Westwater gallery, on the other hand, was purchased by Vittorio Sgarbi for the Mart - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trent and Rovereto. It is Felice Casorati ’s plaster bas-relief depicting The Sleeper, which the artist made in 1924. The work, unpublished on the market, was part of a decorative cycle that Casorati executed for the private Teatrino of Casa Gualino (industrialist Riccardo Gualino was one of the greatest Italian collectors of the early 20th century). The sleeper was one of fourteen bas-reliefs in the Teatrino that served as metopes.

Refined, people-friendly and well-organized. Gian Enzo Sperone promotes the BIAF

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