The Buyer's Guide
by Barbara Plumb

HOW DOES A SOFT-SPOKEN YOUNG ART HISTORIAN scale the heights of Citigroup Private Bank in less than six years to become the darling of upper management working in a field-the art market-known more for its pleasures than for its financial rewards? Born in Milan, Francesca Guglielmino grew up mostly in Bombay, where her father owned a manufacturing company. "I can't think of a better culture, with all its color and different religions, for a child, especially one who is visually alert," she says. When she was 10, she was sent to school in England-spending summers at her parents' house near Portofino-and went on to earn a degree in art history from Cambridge. She went from there to Christie's, where she ran the 19th- and early-20th-century sculpture department for six years, then changed course, writing a monograph on the 18th-century Florentine sculptor Massimiliano Soldani-Benzi and cataloguing Renaissance bronzes at the Lia Museum in La Spezia. After two years, she decided that scholarship was too isolating for her. "I missed dealing with human beings and the transactions," she said. So in 1997, Guglielmino joined then Citicorp's London office as an art adviser. In 1999, she was promoted to business head of Citigroup's Art Advisory Service and moved to New York City. Last October, she landed at LAX with a mandate to expand the business on the West Coast and in Asia. As managing director, she now runs the Art Advisory group from Los Angeles.