Would the politician and businessman Silvio Berlusconi and the painter Pablo Picasso have survived the 21st century of Me Too? If they had been born after the year 2000, what would have happened to them? Would we meet them?…
This week the controversial former Italian Prime Minister has left us, who revolutionized politics, football and television with a style that created school, a mixture of Donald Trump, Jesús Gil y Gil and Roger Ailes. They say that the mausoleum that the sculptor Pietro Cascella created in the gardens of San Martino for Berlusconi, the Celestial Vault, is inspired not only by the Egyptian tombs and that of the Roman emperors, but also by Picasso’s Guernica.
Both the painter and the magnate had a rocky relationship with women, so to speak. The artist’s granddaughter, Marina, wrote that Picasso “subjected them to his animal sexuality, tames them, bewitches them, ingests them and crushes them on his canvas. Having spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he I would get rid of them.”
In recent days, precisely, we have learned of the death, at the age of 101, of Françoise Gilot, the painter who had two children with Picasso (Claude and Paloma), after meeting when he was 62 and she was 22. She was able to plant to the artist. “No woman leaves a man like me,” she assures that she told him, according to Gilot in her book Life of her with Picasso.
Berlusconi was, in a matter of women, very Picassian, but with more stridency. His scandals were notorious, like his bunga-bunga parties with prostitutes. The splendid biopic Silvio (and the others), filmed by Paolo Sorrentino and masterfully interpreted by Toni Servillo, shows the obsession with sex of the Italian politician, also protagonist, among others, of the Ruby Robacorazones scandal.
But both Picasso and Berlusconi followed their path, giving free rein to their instincts, until the day they died. Today, the paintings of the former are still admired and highly valued, while the latter has left at a time of the rise of political populism, as if Berlusconism were multiplying, be it in Milan, Madrid or Miami.
This kind of global Tutti Frutti also refers us to the name of the television program with the Berlusconi stamp that was successful in Spain in the early 1990s, when Mama Chicho became famous on Telecinco (known at the time as Teta-Cinco). That television space, son of the Italian Canale 5 berlusconiano, combined entertainment and frivolity. Today, I would not have passed the Me Too test.
And it is that there was a group of six young Italian dancers, one of whom curiously was called Patrizia Cavaliere (Berlusconi was known as Il Cavaliere), who, very scantily clad in the style of the vedettes, burst onto the set, choreographing a catchy melody that caught on among the Spanish and that today sounds like an epitaph for the former Italian prime minister.
Mom, Chicho touches me
touches me more and more
Mom, Chicho touches me, touches me, touches me…
you defend me
