Biography
Cristiana Romalli, Senior Director Sotheby’s London, joined Sotheby’s in 1985. In 1984, she contributed to the drawings section of the exhibition catalogue Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli (National Gallery, London, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples). She curated with Elizabeth Llewellyn the 1992 exhibition Drawing in Bologna 1550–1600 (Courtauld Institute of Art, London). Most recently, she curated the Drawings section of the exhibition Napoli: Ritorno al barocco. Da Caravaggio a Vanvitelli (1606–1750) at the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples. She is responsible for the drawings section of Bernardo Cavallino in the monograph by Nicola Spinosa, published in 2013. In 2018, she published a catalogue raisonné on Francesco Solimena’s drawings, as part of a publication curated by Nicola Spinosa on the artist. In 2020 she published ‘Cento Disegni dalla Collezione della Fondazione Marco Brunelli’. She contributed to several publications on private collections and drawings exhibitions and published a number of articles in scholarly publications and magazines.
At Sotheby’s, she has worldwide responsibility for all Italian drawings and has organised a large number of major sales, beginning with the 1986 sale in New York of the Gaines Collection and the 1989 London sale of Sir Timothy Clifford's Collection and the Drawings by Taddeo and Federico Zuccaro and Other Artists (New York 1990).
Other sales she has been instrumental in organising include the Bodmer and Castle Howard Michelangelos (New York, 1998, and London 2001), the Pouncey Collection (New York, 2003), the Jeffrey E. Horvitz Collection (New York, 2008), the Robert Lebel Collection (Paris, 2009), the Hoesch Collection (London, 2010) and Dessins de la Collection Christian et Isabelle Adrien (Paris 2018).
She has had numerous opportunities to contribute to scholarship with new discoveries, including drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, now respectively in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and in a Private Collection in the United States.
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