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.‬

A forest of heads filled the nave of the former San Paolo Converso church in central Milan when Christie's held its Modern and Contemporary Art sale there on 24 May. The crowd was so big that Christie's assistants had to move the paintings on display to make room for more chairs. As lot 329 was shown--Donna che nuota sott' acqua, an early forties marble sculpture by Arturo Martini (Fig. 5)--two telephone bidders and a woman in the room engaged in a war which pushed the price past the E800,000 estimate to achieve just under 2.402m [euro] (including buyer's premium). When the auctioneer lowered his gavel, the room erupted in applause. This price is a new world record for the artist and the first time a Christie's lot has broken the 2 million euro barrier in Italy. What makes it all the more striking is that the sale took place on the very day the OECD warned that Italy is facing a recession. But then the Italian art market has been defying a flagging economy for years. 'The market has held up well--it has consolidated', says Sonia Farsetti, with a certain degree of understatement; her auction house, FarsettiArte, sold Italy's top modern art lot last year, Picasso's Tete d'homme et nu assis, for 834,000 [euro]. Italian art prices have boomed since 1995 and grew by 8.8 percent between 2003 and 2004, according to an independent research company, Nomisma.