Antiquari italiani nella Vienna della Restaurazione

The article reviews the current state of scholarship and provides new evidence on the presence of several Italian-speaking art dealers in Vienna in the period following the Congress of 1815 up to around 1848. During this time the Habsburg Empire maintained close political ties with many cities in the northern part of the peninsula such as Trieste, Venice, and Milan, which were provinces within the Empire, as well as with Modena, Parma, and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany for dynastic reasons. Thanks to the temporary end of wars and commercial blockades after the defeat of Napoleon, several art dealers originating from these territories travelled regularly to Vienna for shorter or longer periods, or even settled there, attracted by the appealing and vibrant Viennese cultural and commercial landscape. Such was the case of Carlo Gamorra, member of a family whose ties with the Habsburg-Este dynasty and with prince Carlo Albani are reconstructed here. The article examines also the more occasional presence of figures such as Auguste-Louis de Sivry and Giovanni Querci della Rovere, who established connections with the imperial court, aristocratic collectors like Henryk Lubomirski, Johann Harrach, Clemens Metternich, Johann Czernin, prince Johann I Liechtenstein, Nikolaus Esterházy, and other notable figures such as the banker Johann Grittner and the choreographer Louis-Antoine Duport. The dealers maintained relationships with Viennese dealers of Italian descent, like Pietro Mechetti, operated through correspondence, at other times by setting up warehouses in Vienna. They not only exported paintings from Italian schools to Vienna, but also re-imported works from Northern European schools into the Italian states, thereby helping to shape the taste of an international generation of collectors.