Silvio Berlusconi and Gianni Agnelli
Agnelli-Berlusconi, two opposing souls even in art collecting
Two pieces of news, in the midst of the Middle Eastern apocalypse in progress, allow us, for a few minutes, to shift our attention to the most evanescent of topics: art and specifically art collecting which involves those wealthy classes who, through their collections, aspire to publicly share their will to power. The rich or the Gentleman necessarily, they have very different methods of building private art galleries (think of the cardinals of the past), also because economic display alone does not always equate to a search for aesthetic beauty, especially when it comes to contemporary art.
Therefore, the comparisons between the collections of the two Scrooges of Italy appear very illuminating to us, the lawyer Lambs and the Knight Berlusconi. Nothing more dissimilar in terms of forms, research, elaboration of historical and philological paths, which express as many easily judged cultural interests, also in light of the detective story that has crossed the artistic heritage inherited by Agnelli’s children, and what has been found, it is appropriate to say , by the Berlusconi scions.
In the first case, Gianni And Marella they have shared a very expensive passion for decades, for contemporary art and not only that, which led them to accumulate hundreds of works so important that they had to ask for the help of Renzo Piano (not surprisingly Author of the headquarters of Huston’s De Menill Collection) to create the Casket with the most important works: a public museum in all respects, which pays homage to the patronage of the Family, to the death of the patriarch.
Everything in that collection is elegance, sensitivity, the ability to identify artistic currents in slow development, it represents an Anglo-Saxon idea (see the enormous quantity of private collections which have been donated to the most important museums in the world), which relates well to the character, a universally recognized style icon and indestructible producer of ways of being, of dressing, and above all of always living above banality and everyday normality.
Unfortunately, yet another misstep occurs in Brianza, by Scrooge (Milan) Due, Silvioobviously discovered art late, despite having a beautiful collection, if I remember correctly, in the villa, Casati Stampa in Arcore, but it seems to me an exaggeration to say that it was one of his passions, even if we were surprised by the news of the discovery of a huge warehouse where ours kept his treasures which represent, in addition to his aesthetic idea, his profoundly naive nature in evaluating artistic expressions.
Anything wrong. Madonnas, nudes, landscapes, still lifes, portraits, bought during night auctions in the boredom of Brianza, which accumulate without any philological project, in the enormous corridors, twenty-five thousand works! It seems to cost over twenty million euros.
It is not the naive existential style that is surprising, after all he remained a simple man who preferred other expensive toys, but the Berlusconi collection (so to speak) will not need to be shown, even if it would certainly please the museum users of the Sunday. Gianni against Silvioonce again, with the mystery of the disappearance of the first and with the epiphany of the second, it is really true that a man is recognized by how he lives and how he dresses, and there is no master of ceremonies who can clean up the natural vulgarity of the parvenu, even if nice, and even if behind the works owned by the Lawyer there are intrigues, possible thefts, and knife fights between the heirs.
We would have preferred not to see that infinite series of ugly nudes and rural landscapes that meaninglessly clog the walls of the Mega-Shed which could never become the essential architecture of Piano “noblesse oblige”, even if there is a stubborn will in the collection of “Scrooge two” and it is to create in indifferent and shoddy quantity, a new aesthetic principle where the voting population can recognize themselves, find themselves.
Among the bright and essential rooms of Turin and the other “très chic” mansions of the Lambs and the Brianza rod factory, there is a story, a legend, and the always postponed clash between two incompatible visions (one does not acquire the Lucien Freuds, the Ballas, the Bacons, but also the Matisses and the Canalettos by chance), because they remember that the origins cannot be changed with planetary success, with the daneé, and culture and anthropology always lead us back, to the place where we were born, which cannot be erased with a simple stroke of the background color.
#AgnelliBerlusconi #Scrooge #McDuck #collectors #Turin #Arcore