The Indefatigable Abate Celotti
The seminar in the History of Collecting was held by ANNE-MARIE EZE at the Wallace Collection (Hertford House, Manchester Square, London), on Monday, 25 February 2008, at 5.30 pm, in the Lecture Theatre. Full title: “At home in all régimes as long as there were clients to buy his pictures”. The Indefatigable Abate Celotti: a Cleric-turned-Dealer in Nineteenth-Century Venice.
Amongst library and art historians working in the field of manuscript illumination, the abate Luigi Celotti (1759-1843) has achieved notoriety as the “somewhat mysterious”, “shady” and “unscrupulous salesman”, who sold at auction at Christie’s in London on the 26th May 1825: “A Highly Valuable and Extremely Curious Collection of Illumined Miniature Paintings, of the Greatest Beauty, and of Exquisite Finishing, Taken from the Choral Books of the Papal Chapel in the Vatican, during the French Revolution”. As the first-ever exclusive sale of single leaves and miniatures cut from Italian illuminated manuscripts, Celotti’s auction is often cited as a landmark in the history of the practice of dismembering medieval and Renaissance books, which became popular during the nineteenth century as a result of the growth in the taste for Primitives. The ubiquity of Celotti’s name in the provenance records of numerous Old Master paintings and drawings, furniture and objets d’art, which were dispersed from Venetian patrician and ecclesiastical collections during the decades of French and Austrian rule following the fall of the Republic in 1797, has also earned him the reputation of being “at home in all régimes – as long as there were clients to buy his pictures”. To date there has been little study of Celotti and his dealings in their own right. Consequently, the significance of his role in the history of collecting in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century has yet to be fully appreciated.
For further information contact leda.cosentino@wallacecollection.org
