The parties could be exhausting. But also, especially in recent times, somewhat frustrating. So Silvio Berlusconi, who died last June, secluded himself in his room and, as he used to do in the old days as a real estate salesman, took refuge in the magic of the telephone from 10:30 p.m. This time, however, he came to the device as a buyer. Or rather as a compulsive bidder in telephone auctions of Italian art. In teleshopping programs, in short. In December 2019 it happened for the first time.
-Hello, yes… I’ll keep that painting.
-Good night. Are you a new client? What’s it called?
-I am Silvio Berlusconi.
-Yes, of course. Bye bye.
The Neapolitan Giuseppe De Gregorio had for some time had an art teleshopping program on channel 129. A kind of live auction in which viewers bid on works of art of all kinds, generally of modest economic value and little importance. . That December night he received an unexpected call. The problem is that he hung up the phone twice on whom he considered a prankster who was posing as the four-time prime minister to tease him. “Many funny people call. Sometimes some say they are Napoleon Bonaparte. But that man called again two more times. And the third time he told me: ‘Look, write down this number, call and ask who I am.’ He will see that I am not lying to him.’ She was the president’s secretary,” De Gregorio recalls on the phone.
Berlusconi, who was already 82 years old at the time, began calling almost every night. He never missed a bid on any of NewArte’s four weekly programs. He could have agreed everything directly with the owner, who was amazed at what was happening. But he liked that whole process. There came a time when the program decided to give him a private line for himself. And he bought everything. There were times when De Gregorio had acquired material to satisfy him for a month, but Il Cavaliere devoured it all in a single evening. “It was astonishing. For three years we were taking two or three huge trucks full of paintings to his house in Arcore every month. We became very friends. And he told me that he wanted to build the largest collection of paintings in Italy. So I provided him with the goods. When we finished he asked us: ‘How? Are you done yet? ”He remembers.
The owner of Mediaset also began to buy fountains, sculptures, vases, and centerpieces. But, above all, modest paintings, worth 100 or 200 euros. He acquired more than 7,000 works from De Gregorio. “He really liked the ones that featured Paris, because he had lived in France. And also those of Venice. I also had paintings painted by an artist with very beautiful scenes in Milan. He bought a little of everything, but he also selected. Almost all by contemporary artists. He didn’t want expensive or important things. Only beautiful works that expressed something,” explains De Gregorio. For his birthday, De Gregorio gave him a three-meter-high statue in the image and likeness of the magnate. Another time, he brought her 10 kilos of lemons from the Amalfi Coast. “He was very humble.”
The goal was nothing more than to be the largest collector in the country. “The problem is that it wasn’t worth a damn. I warned him thousands of times, I tried to prevent him just as many times. But he never listened to me. I think he consoled himself like this when the Bunga Bunga parties ended,” says his friend Vittorio Scarbi, prestigious art critic and current Secretary of State for Culture. The reality is that now the magnate’s heirs do not know very well what to do with the contents of the enormous hangar that he bought next to the mansion to store more than 25,000 pieces.
Berlusconi’s taste, Sgarbi also remembers, was shaped over the years. But it could be said that he started from the basis of the collection that he found ready made when he bought the villa San Martino in Arcore. The mansion had belonged to the Marquis of Casati Stampa, who in 1970 murdered her wife and her lover after a series of comings and goings of erotic games that he had carefully recorded in her diary. The murderer’s daughter received an inheritance that included that 18th century mansion and the tutor assigned to her, Cesare Previti, advised her to sell it to a then still little-known businessman who paid her a ridiculous sum. She, in order to get him off her back, accepted. The businessman, of course, was Berlusconi. And Previti later became Minister of Defense of the Executive of Il Cavaliere.
Villa San Martino has a chapel with a painting by Bonaccini. The house also housed a tintoretto which had originally been attributed to another artist, a self-portrait by Rembrandt, a Titiansome pieces from the Venetian school and a plinio nomellini. But the Cavaliere liked another type of art, more modest, perhaps less profound. “It was more something of spectacular scenery than a cultural fact of relief or knowledge. He was not an expert. He didn’t listen to anyone, not even me. I told him that 20 million euros buying 100 paintings was better than buying 24,000. He didn’t care,” insists Sgarbi. “Look, once you stop filling your nights with girls, then you fill them with a television that allows you to say, “Look at that still life.”
The family, which has already distributed the magnate’s inheritance, now has to decide what to do with all those paintings with a difficult market opportunity because they were the personal whims of the former prime minister. Sgarbi, who represents the State in these types of matters, provides a solution. “I would make a kind of amusement park to go see Berlusconi’s paintings and contemplate the Arcore gardens. I already told you that it is not worth it for the heirs to keep those works. But it would be fun to represent a baroque, surreal phenomenon… I think it can be justified from the point of view of adventure, of madness. And madness is always beautiful.” And Berlusconi would probably have agreed with that.
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