Where passion drives the market; in defiance of the country's flagging economy, the Italian art market has grown vigorously in the past decade. A new generation of collectors is discovering the country's contemporary artists and is moving into under-explored areas, such as nineteenth-century Italian painting

Apollo, July, 2005 by Carla Passino

The same cultural change is affecting the decorative-art market. The Nomisma research shows that both dealers and auction houses have recorded stable volumes and growing prices for silver. The same has happened with carpets, while furniture and, to a greater degree, picture frames have seen a rise in prices and a parallel decline in volumes. This seems to suggest that these markets, even more than paintings, are in the hands of a small elite prepared to pay high prices but only for really good pieces.

'The furniture market is particularly static, with the exception of extraordinary pieces such as those made by [neoclassical cabinetmaker Giuseppe] Maggiolini', says Di Castro. 'Houses are different from the past. Pieces whose main purpose was to furnish the house, such as commodes and console tables, have seen a significant reduction in prices--so much so that now is perhaps the time to stock up on them.'

Ceramics, by contrast, have risen in both sales and prices. 'Taste has changed', explains Sotheby's Lotti, who held a very successful sale of eighteenth-century porcelain and maiolica from the collection of Turin's ceramic dealer Enrico Questa, earlier this year (Fig. 6). 'The Questa sale was risky in that it offered so much maiolica and porcelain in one go, but we had good results. Where, say, an eighteenth-century bureau-trumeau from Lombardy would be harder to sell, these types of decorative object have a wider appeal.'

Driving away the buyers: the art market and Italy's export laws

In every sector of the Italian art market, prices and volumes lag far behind those in the United Kingdom and elsewhere: Nomisma values the market at between 297m [euro] and 413m [euro], against 7bn [euro] for Britain and 2bn [euro] for France. Is this because the rigid laws that regulate art exports deter foreign buyers? 'Essentially, this is the reason why prices are lower here than abroad', says Alessandro Galli of Milan auction house Porro & C. 'The proof of this lies in comparing the Old Masters market, which is the one worst hit [by the export bans] with the one for paintings which are less than fifty years old, where figures are significant and in line with foreign prices.'

A new act of parliament, the Nuovo Codice per i Beni Culturali e del Paesaggio, came into force last year, but it did not significantly alter the rules. The law still gives the Italian state a sixty-day pre-emptive right to buy a work of art--the diritto di prelazione--at the price agreed between buyer and vendor. It also requires any work that is more than fifty years old and whose creator is no longer alive to be presented to the export office of the local Soprintendenza delle Belle Arti for evaluation. If the office decides it is of national importance, the work will be 'notified', which means that it cannot leave Italy--even to go to another EU country. The office can in addition recommend that the Ministry for Culture purchase the piece. If the Ministry decides to buy it, sale is mandatory. However, the office can notify a work of art, preventing export, without the Ministry having to buy it.