03 September, 14:03
Entertainment
Philippe Daverio, the art of telling art
He was 70 years old, from Passepartout to books, never banal popularizer
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Philippe Daverio © ANSA
(by Silvia Lambertucci)
"Against lockdown depression it is essential to use the brain and the imagination".
Thin and perhaps a bit raucous, but always ironically dandy, round glasses and bow ties, Philippe Daverio - who died at the age of 70 at the Cancer Institute in Milan - thus supported the Italians segregated by the Covid pandemic only a few months ago.
Those were the days of the invitations to stay at home and he, the social spirit par excellence, acrobatic entertainer with the talent of enchanting everyone from the lounges of Milan well to the TV, spoke from his Milanese home, his hands on the piano keyboard, look straight at the camera and his very particular way of taking every spectator under his arm, as happened with Passepartout, the Rai3 program that almost twenty years ago made him known to the general public.
"We cannot see anyone physically, but we have the right to a whole world that we can see virtually", he urged, magnifying the wonders of digital technology capable of making the pandemic "very different from the Manzoni plague".
Born in Mulhouse, Alsace in 1949, the son of an Italian builder and an Alsatian, he had received a nineteenth-century education.
In Milan, where the family moved early, he enrolled in the Polytechnic, an economics study which he never completed.
His vocation, he said, was that of an art historian, a profession that he ended up professing in a very particular role, tailored to his volcanic personality.
Outside the academies, which for a long time have looked at him wrong, yet inserted in the institutions, if you think that he taught at the IULM and held an industrial design course at the University of Palermo.
Polyglot, eclectic, tirelessly curious and highly cultured, Daverio had the ability to mix topics and languages and the gift of being followed by everyone, from the literate as well as the most pop spectator.
Art, he said, "must serve a little to this, it must help to understand one's time".
Gallerist, producer, publisher, animator of a thousand initiatives, consultant for many important Milanese restorations from the Duomo to Palazzo Reale, engaged in the Board of Directors of La Scala, long-time juror of Campiello in Venice, was tempted by politics, councilor for culture in Milan in the first junta League, the one led by Formentini.
"A failure", he later admitted, always denying his closeness to the ideas of the League ("It was the League that embraced the Daverian ideas, not the other way around") and above all, he stressed, far from Salvini's party, to which he contested the 'anti-Europeanism and more: "We know of Berlusconi that he defends his interests - he explained in an interview with Daria Bignardi at the Barbarian Invasions - Salvini does not know what he defends, perhaps a fear".
In fact, politics had disappointed him and left him, he said, "in conditions close to poverty".
It was 1997, when a door was closed, a door was opened, with almost twenty years of television and many publications to which he entrusted the story of the art and beauties of the country, villages and monuments but also a single painting, which he magnified and he invited us to discover, always placing himself as an exceptional guide, an affable and extraordinarily erudite travel companion, able to pass with extreme naturalness from Giotto to fascist architecture, from the relationship with the sacred of the Russian intellectual avant-gardes of the early twentieth century to the birth of Baroque.
Politics as a civil commitment has returned to the field in recent years, with appeals for the safeguarding of Venice and interventions on the landscape, but also with ideas for a museum closer to the needs of the contemporary world.
His ideal - expertly told in many volumes - would not by chance have questioned all the categories of the known, confusing and remixing them, to tell a new story or simply to reread that same story with different eyes.
A museum, he said, "where to explain political painting there are, gathered in a single large room, the colossal Raft of the Medusa by Theodore Gericault and Liberta 'guiding the people of Delacroix, Guernica by Picasso and the Fourth Estate of Pelizza from Volpedo, the Statue of Liberty in New York and the Goya Shooting ".
Culture, institutions and even politics pay homage to him.
From minister Franceschini who also remembers his "extraordinary humanity" to the director of the Uffizi Schmidt for whom he was "one of the most effective and happy ambassadors of art", from the mayor of Milan Sala who recalls his "freedom of thought" to Salvini ("He told the Italians about Italy").
The Brera museum, which included him in its scientific committee, will host his mortuary tomorrow.
On the front pages of many newspapers, meanwhile, the advertising of his latest editorial effort stands out.
With a title that seems to sum up the commitment of a lifetime: "A tale of Western art, from the Greeks to pop art"
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