“(…) So Giorgina, after the separation from Bernardo [Caprotti family], worked for a long time as a clerk at La Rinascente, then slowly built up a new profession as an art expert. She became the manager of the Milan office of Christie’s auction house, then set up on her own, creating a consultancy company specialising in valuing works of art. With Mamma I met personalities such as Gae Aulenti, Vittorio Gregotti, Pierluigi Cerri, Eugenio Scalfari, Guido Rossi, Alberto Lattuada and Ettore Sottsass. (…)”. (G. CAPROTTI, Le Ossa dei Caprotti, p. 90).
The great architects and designers of an equally great city like Milan from the 1950s-1960s onwards gravitated to the same sphere, knew each other, perhaps studied together, like Gae Aulenti and Vittorio Gregotti, and even collaborated; not infrequently they devoted themselves not only to large-scale works, but also to the design of interiors and furnishing elements, which often became iconic, e.g. Sottsass’s ‘Ultrafragola’ mirror, designed for Poltronova in 1970, surrounded by a pink, sinuous neon the ‘Pipistrello’ lamp by Gae Aulenti, created in 1965 for Martinelli Luce, with its adjustable stem and diffuser moulded using innovative techniques for the time, the ‘Amalasunta’ floor lamp by Gregotti for Bilumen (1971), which likes to play with light.
The great architect-designers are found on several occasions. Pierluigi Cerri, who has designed and curated installations for the world’s greatest museums, and Ettore Sottsass, for example, donated designs for the new exhibition design of the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan: ” (…) Pier Luigi Cerri, with his ironic understatement (‘you don’t have any money to make an exhibition design: why don’t you ask me?), who invented a modular display system that has been reused for numerous exhibitions, thanks to the gift of Unifor; Ettore Sottsass, to whom we owe the fantastic installations created for the exhibition dedicated to Federico Zeri’s sculpture collection in 1989 and for the one dedicated to Piero della Francesca’s Augustinian polyptych in 1996 (…)” (quoted by A. ZANNI, “L’arte del dono. Da Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli a oggi”, Milan 2022).
Giorgina Venosta, Donatella Brustio, Cerri’s wife, and Vittorio Gregotti donated works on that occasion, as did Giulia Maria Crespi, who cannot be missing from the unofficial list of much of Milan’s Gotha from 1880 onwards that is the exhibition catalogue ‘L’Arte del Dono. Da Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli a oggi”, held on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the birth of the 19th-century Milanese patron, and in which appear many names linked to the Venosta and Bassetti families by kinship, friendship or affection.
Giorgina, who from 1977 to 1991 was the representative in Milan for the auction house Christie’s, with the task of liaising with all the experts in the various sectors, and then an art expert with her own company, Consulenza d’Arte, which she founded in 1992 with two other partners, could only move well in such an environment, forging friendships that lasted a lifetime. The house on Lake Monate, where she spent long periods of time with her second husband, Aldo Bassetti, is the setting for parties, lunches and summer conversations in the interior and the large garden, of which a wealth of photographs remain. The acquaintance with Gae Aulenti goes back a long way, as can be seen in the pictures of a young Giorgina chatting with the still brunette Aulenti; the grey helmet that was to become the great architect’s ‘hallmark’ would later appear on many occasions on the lake, or at Lina Sotis‘s bachelor party in 1993.
Vittorio and Marina were friends of his mother long before she got back together with Aldo; I remember a holiday together in Panarea immediately after the Lindos ‘phase’. The Gregotti couple continued to see each other in the summer, and there are many photographs of bathing and boat trips in the seas of Greece.
Bibliography:
The Art of Giving. Da Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli a oggi, exhibition edited by A. Zanni and F. Manoli, Milan, 2022
Giorgina Venosta’s profile on the “Consulenza d’Arte” website(http://www.consulenzadarte.it/)
G. CAPROTTI, Le Ossa dei Caprotti. Una storia italiana, Milan, 2023
