Salamon Gallery
Established in 1950, the Salamon gallery has built up a reputation over the past seventy years as a focal point in Italy for connoisseurs and collectors of old master paintings and drawings.
Now managed by Matteo Salamon, family’s third generation, the gallery is well known for its discernment in the selection of the works of art it handles, all of them meticulously chosen on the basis of such strict criteria as their quality, provenance, history and their excellent condition.
All our works of art are offered to customers only after we have acquired the absolute certainty that they meet all the above criteria, without any exception. The gallery also offers its services to collectors who would like to sell, or simply to value, the paintings and drawings in their collections, and in addition to assisting customers interested in buying or selling, we are also happy to offer them our expertise in the fields of restoration and conservation.
We pride ourselves in being in a position to introduce connoisseurs to leading art historians capable of exploring the reasons for individual items’ intrinsic historical value in detailed scholarly papers. And finally, we are happy to offer evaluations for insurance purposes.
The gallery’s exhibition rooms, situated on the “piano nobile” of the historic Palazzo Cicogna in the heart of Milan, are the ideal venue for viewing our paintings and drawings in a serene and utterly discreet environment. We prefer to receive by appointment in order to be able to give our customers the special attention each of them deserves.
Our library, one of the most complete and up-to-date private art libraries in Italy, is open to collectors, historians and fellow antique dealers on site by appointment.
Matteo Salamon joined the family business in the mid-1980s and opened his own gallery at the turn of the 20th century.
From the outset, he has steered the gallery’s choices in the direction of his own areas of special cultural interest, namely Italian painting with a specific focus on 14th and 15th century Tuscan work and on 18th century Venetian vedutismo, in addition to which he has eagerly upheld the family tradition of expertise in Italian drawings from the 15th to the 18th centuries.
Over the past thirty years, the Salamon gallery has become a beacon at the international level for collectors and scholars with an interest in these particular areas of fine art. Matteo argues that a dealer’s skill lies in his or her ability to coordinate the numerous professionals and experts who offer their services to the gallery; the gallery works with the most important restorers in Italy, whose task it is to return a work of art to its original state as closely as possible; and secondly do deal with art historians, a majority of whom hold managerial posts in museums and who are tasked with studying the works of art and tracing the history of their provenance as accurately and as far back as possible.
In that respect, Matteo prefers to acquire paintings from private collections aided in this by his family’s age-old familiarity with some of European’s most important collectors in that they frequently represent outright rediscoveries from an art historical point of view. And last but not least, the gallery’s relations with its customers are invariably built on a one-to-one basis, with Matteo conducting all negotiations in the first person.
The gallery offers a bespoke service, tailored to meet customers’ individual requirements, thus allowing them to rely on the professionalism and natural discretion that he and all those working with and for him consider to be part and parcel of the way they do business.
At the Salamon gallery the customer is never a mere number, as is so often the case even with leading international auction houses, because Matteo considers a deep interest in human relations and the construction of a consolidated relationship built on trust and confidence to be an antique dealer’s primary and most important duty.