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The eccentric art historian died tonight at the Istituto dei Tumori in Milan. This was announced by the director and director of Franco Parenti Andree Ruth Shammah. Lecturer and essayist, former councilor for culture of the Lombard capital, he was 71 years old
by Leonardo Piccinini
The eccentric art historian died tonight at the Istituto dei Tumori in Milan. This was announced by the director and director of Franco Parenti Andree Ruth Shammah. Lecturer and essayist, former councilor for culture of the Lombard capital, he was 71 years old
2 ‘reading
For me, who came from Modena, the meeting with Philippe Daverio was an immediate shock. He knew everything, and what he didn’t know, he felt. But how was that possible? Not really. But almost. The ability to write, speak and think in multiple languages, the haunting curiosity, revealed itself, more than in any other circumstance, along the way.
We shot together in Europe, in China, in Cuba … it was a lot of fun. I have learned everything. The Italians, who wanted to place him in a specific category, incorrectly defined him as an “art historian.” For me it was much more. With many art historians, you can’t get to the end of a phone call, you could have stayed with it for hours. Last year we went out together, with his wife Elena and a nice and polite dog, to the TEFAF in Maastricht, the most important art and antique fair in the world. It was one of his privileged routes, the Rhine valley where he grew up, the Mulhouse of his childhood, Basel: he knew every dialect and accent, every historical nuance and every eating habit of those places.
The “Wie geht’s” with whom the telephone calls of friends and family began, the memories of Ernst Beyeler, the passion for the Middle Ages in which the lands of Charlemagne had been divided between the nascent states in conflict with each other, until the disasters of the past. 150 years, from Sedan. We stopped in Baden Baden to buy a hat (I had forgotten it in Milan and obviously couldn’t do without it…) and we discovered that it was a store that supplied… Adolf Hitler, immortalized with the same hat!
In Strasbourg, in Aachen, in Maastricht: in the city of Limburg he loved to return every time to the treasure of the Basilica of Saint Servatius, to see his beloved goldsmiths, objects from Mosan, Arab art, from all over the world that ended there, in that crucible. of civilization. He was a convinced Europeanist because he had experienced first-hand the sufferings of that corner of the world. And he was comfortable with the Maastricht merchants, as a former merchant and also a collector.
He collected objects, paintings, busts (the beauty of Napoleon de Chaudet) with which he had masterfully furnished an entire wing of his labyrinthine apartment in Piazza Bertarelli. I watched him move one afternoon while, I no longer remember in which city, a Silbermann organ of the beloved of Mozart, by Schweitzer, was magnificently played accompanied by a children’s choir. And I am moved too, just thinking about it.
