Salamon Gallery
Established in 1950, the Salamon Gallery has been a focal point for connoisseurs and collectors of old master paintings and drawings for over seventy years.
Now managed by the family’s third generation, the gallery is reputed for the extreme discernment with which it selects the works of art that it handles, all of them meticulously chosen on the basis of such criteria as their quality, their provenance, the importance of their collecting history and their excellent condition. Thus, the gallery only offers its works of art to its clientele after stringent examination and research.
The gallery also offers its services to collectors who would like to sell, or simply to value, the paintings and drawings in their collections, including for insurance purposes.
We pride ourselves equally on assisting customers with our expertise in the conservation and enhancement of works of art, and in arranging introductions to leading art historians to explore the reasons behind individual items’ intrinsic historical value through the production of thoroughly researched and detailed scholarly papers.
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 absolutely discreet environment. We receive by appointment only, in order to be able to give our customers the full attention they quite rightly expect.
Our library, one of the most complete and up-to-date private art libraries in Italy, is also open to collectors, historians and fellow antique dealers (on site, by appointment only).
Joining the family business in the mid-1980s, Matteo Salamon opened his own gallery in the late ‘90s.
He has steered the gallery’s choices from the outset 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 enthusiastically 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 special skill lies in his or her ability to coordinate the numerous professionals and experts who offer their services to the gallery; first and foremost restoration workshops, and in that respect the gallery works with Italy’s most important restorers in the field of painting, whose task it is to return a work of art to its original state as closely as possible; and secondly, art historians 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 Europe’s most important collectors, with the result that the paintings thus sourced 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. 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.
The gallery offers a bespoke service tailored to meet customers’ individual requirements, thus allowing them to count on the professionalism and natural discretion that Matteo and all those working with and for him consider to be part and parcel of the way they do business.