Frascione Gallery brings works of Old Masters to the Palm Beach's Worth Avenue

A gallery with roots that run more than a century deep in Italy has opened its newest location in Palm Beach.

Frascione Gallery, tucked away in Via Amore on Worth Avenue, is the first U.S. site for the gallery, which was founded in Florence, Italy, in 2009 but has a pedigree that extends back to 1893.

The gallery, owned and operated by husband-wife team Federico Gandolfi Vannini and Daisy Diaz, draws on a collection based in Florence, Italy, that features rare and distinct images from the Baroque, Medieval and Renaissance periods, the couple said.

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“We have always been dealers of art,” Vannini said of his family. His great-grandfather, Enrico Frascione, who founded the collection in the late 19th century, worked with museums and collections around the world, Vannini said. Frascione would spend months crossing the Atlantic to the U.S. and then attending auctions, he said.

“It’s not like today, you’re on the phone and wiring the money. It’s very romantic,” he said.

While their collection is known for works by the Old Masters — a group of European artists who worked before 1800 — the gallery space blends those pieces with contemporary works. Vannini looks for complementary pairings: A work from an Old Master and a piece from the 20th or 21st century that enhance each other.

In one such grouping, Vannini placed three portraits: In the center, the 17th century "Portrait of Claudia de' Medici" by Justus Sustermans, and on either side, a contemporary portrait by Cuban artist Diango Hernandez.

"In this case, what you can put together is the talent, the attention to details," Vannini said.

The goal is to create a dialogue between the pieces, he said.

"That can be based on anything," Vannini said. "Aesthetics, spirituality."

He also is known for his ability to find historically important works that may be layered under centuries of dirt and additional paint, or in a frame that is out of place, Diaz said.

“They’ll put this frame on, or they’ll varnish it in a wrong technique, and then somehow it gets to his hands, and he looks at it very much like the Preservation Foundation,” she said, referring to the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach and its work preserving and protecting sites of historical importance around the island.

“When you buy a piece, usually it’s like a gemstone. It could be a diamond but with black charcoal on top, so people only see the black charcoal,” Vannini said. “But we can see there’s a diamond inside.”

This happened recently when Vannini acquired a painting of Saint Sebastian. The work was from the Renaissance era and the artist was unknown, but the varnish had yellowed and the painting needed to be restored, Vannini said.

As his restoration team worked, they began to uncover signs that there was something very special about the painting. They noticed "pentimenti," or changes made to a painting by an artist.

"During the cleaning, you can realize that the painting had changed," Vannini said. "What began as only an instinct ... then you realize that your intuition was great."

As the restorers and Vannini closely examined the painting, they saw that the artist had changed the position of the saint's head and arm, Vannini said.

After consulting with an expert in London, the determination was made: The painting was by Titian, one of the foremost painters of the 16th century Renaissance.

The couple and their four children moved to the U.S. from Italy just as the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020.

“We took one of the last flights from Italy to America,” Vannini said. “Italy had gotten hit first.”

“It was horrible,” Diaz added. “We told our kids, ‘Two weeks and we will come back.’ They had to leave school, everything. And we never came back. We thought it would be two weeks, just to slow the spread.”

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They settled in Miami, but fell in love with Palm Beach on a vacation there.

“I had been here before, but Palm Beach has really changed tremendously,” Diaz said. “The beauty’s always been there, but there’s just something different, or maybe we’re just at a different stage of our lives,” she added, laughing.

The couple felt transported to a different world, thinking it was incredible that they could hop on the Brightline train from Miami and arrive somewhere like Palm Beach.

“We realized right away that this was the better place for us, for our gallery,” Vannini said. “That same weekend, we found this space and it just seemed to sort of click.”

That was in January of 2023, and within the space of less than a year, the couple was able to arrange and open the Frascione Gallery.

Frascione Gallery

Address: 256 Worth Ave., Suite O, Palm Beach

Information: frascionearte.com

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Frascione Gallery brings works of Old Masters to Palm Beach