BIAF 2026

26 September – 4 October 2026

Palazzo Corsini, Florence

VOENA is pleased to announce our participation in the Biennale Internazionale dell'Antiquariato di Firenze 2026, with a selection of masterworks spanning the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, with paintings by Vincenzo Cabianca, Pietro Paolini, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, Nicolas Régnier and Antonio Muzzi.

The selection reﬂect’s VOENA’s longstanding expertise, and an enduring commitment to museum-quality works, and scholarly research – uniting rarity and distinguished provenance. The display includes the following highlights.

Vincenzo Cabianca, Ai bagni di Viareggio, 1866

Ai bagni di Viareggio, a luminous vista long believed lost and now recognised as one of the pinnacles of the Vincenzo Cabianca’s career. The artist’s work is exceptionally rare at this scale, a large-format Macchiaioli masterpiece of a kind almost never found outside Italy. Sent in 1866 to the Società Promotrice delle Belle Arti in Turin, ﬁrst capital of a newly uniﬁed Italy under Victor Emmanuel II, it sold for the extraordinary sum of 1,800 lire, when comparable works fetched just 250 to 500. It recently resold at an international auction in excess of $1 million.

Across the expanse of Viareggio's beach, Cabianca sets fashionably dressed women moving freely among the sellers, an image of elegance, modernity and newfound liberty, rendered in the shimmering macchia of pure light and colour that anticipates the innovations of Manet by several years.

Pietro Paolini, Portrait of Two Men, mid-seventeenth century

Among the most signiﬁcant Old Masters on the stand is a masterpiece by Pietro Paolini, one of the ﬁnest works to have descended from the celebrated Mansi collection in Lucca and a rare instance of a signed painting by the artist. Executed around the middle of the seventeenth century, it dates from the mature phase of Paolini's career, when he tempered his naturalism with a more contemplative and symbolic vision of portraiture.

A fragmentary inscription at the far left may identify the elder sitter as the Lucchese poet Stefano Coli, a friend of the painter. Within a softly lit interior, animated by books, expressive gestures and unﬂinching gazes, the scene conjures a learned exchange between two generations, and between the active and contemplative life.

Once in the Mansi collection, the painting was shown in Lucca in 1921 and in Florence in 1922 and appears in nineteenth-century sources.

Jean-Baptiste Oudry, The Fisherman and the Little Fish, Salon of 1739

Another key work is Jean-Baptiste Oudry's The Fisherman and the Little Fish, presented at the Salon in 1739 and the artist's sole surviving history painting. Oudry was the foremost animal painter of the French eighteenth century, celebrated for his still lifes, game pieces, hunting scenes, and depictions of exotic animals, who reigned supreme as Europe's foremost animalier and counted the king of France among his patrons.

The canvas, presented in its original frame, reprises a theme from the famous Fables of Jean de La Fontaine, which Oudry had illustrated in a celebrated series of 276 highly ﬁnished drawings. Here the artist showcases his skills as a painter of naturalia, rendering the dog, the hunter's luscious leopard pelt, the rich foliage, net, basket, and ﬁsh with textural richness and exacting verisimilitude.

At the same time, the ﬁgure of the ﬁsherman, calibrated to meet academic standards for the male nude, is a rare standout in the artist's oeuvre and one of only three examples uniting the ﬁgure with the animals. The painting comes from the collection of Sir Elton John and was previously shortlisted for acquisition by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Works

Ai bagni di Viareggio (At the baths of Viareggio) — Vincenzo Cabianca, 1866
The Fisherman and the Little Fish from Fontaine’s Fables — Jean-Baptiste Oudry, 1739