Together with the works of Salerno, Briganti and a few others, Busiri's passionate efforts served, on the one hand, to focus on a real issue (repositioning adequately on the artistic scene of their time artists looked at with sufficient critical acclaim), while, on the other hand, they had the effect of bringing the attention of the market on masters and pictorial genres considered minor and little commercially valued. In this way the conditions were set for the relaunch of these artists and for the reception of their works in the collections of refined connoisseurs or, simply, in the homes of an upper middle class of educated professionals (category, ahinoi, today a little 'disarmed), who for passion, but also, as is physiological, for ambition, spirit of imitation, search for prestige, addressed the ancient paintings and the preciousness that, then more than today, was recognized to them. The new millennium, with its economic crises on a global scale, would then sanction the progressive recession.

After the book by Busiri Vici, in the following four decades the critical fortune of Alessio De Marchis could benefit from few further contributions: essentially the monographic volume edited by Andrea Emiliani in 1992, Alessio De Marchis and his workshop, mainly focused on the painter's activity between Marche and Umbria, and recently the small exhibition Alessio De Marchis and the landscape painters in Rome between the six and eighteenth centuries, organized in 2016 in Bitonto at the National Gallery of Puglia "Girolamo e Rosaria Devanna".

The exhibition that Bertolami Fine Art promotes and welcomes today in the hall of its Roman headquarters in Palazzo Caetani Lovatelli, designed by his friends Flavio and Sandro Poggi in homage to the loving collection of works by De Marchis made by his father Aldo over a lifetime, aims to give an adequate representation of the painter's entire production, focusing particularly on his Roman period. The selection of over forty autographed works, accompanied by a worthy outline of paintings executed by protagonists of the Roman scene between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fully highlights De Marchis' refined and cultured conception of landscape painting, in which, in a personal blend of high lyricism, influences linked both to the Italian tradition and to Flemish and Dutch tradition find space.

In taking on the project of Flavio and Sandro Poggi, Bertolami Fine Art confirms its determination to combine its natural and primary commercial vocation with an exquisitely scientific cultural promotion activity. We are in fact convinced that, for those who care about the care, diffusion and circulation of ancient art, it is necessary to encourage contact, familiarity, conscious relationship and therefore the enjoyment by an increasingly wide audience, through a constant and carefully selected cultural offer. In this direction, the exhibition dedicated to Alessio De Marchis takes on an exemplary value, being part of a virtuous circle between knowledge, protection, appreciation, understanding and aspiration to possession, capable of making our relationship with the ancient alive and current, and destined, in return, to project its positive reflections on the market.

Luca Bortolotti
Head of Department Old Masters Bertolami Fine Art