\n<\/p>\n
As his political fortunes sank, his legal and love life tangled, and his age caught up with him, Silvio Berlusconi stayed up late in his mansion outside Milan calling the hotlines of late-night art shopping television channels.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t really matter what the oil painting and antiques vendors hawked. Landscapes. Sculptures. Portraits. A fair share of nudes. Night after night, and then year after year, the octogenarian media mogul and former prime minister who wanted to have it all tried to buy it all, amassing an enormous collection of all the mail-order art he could lay his bleary eyes on.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe had this project to build the largest collection in Italy,\u201d said Giuseppe De Gregorio, a televendor near <\/strong>Naples who sold thousands of paintings to Mr. Berlusconi. \u201cHe didn\u2019t want important paintings. He wanted paintings. It was enough if they were painted with oil on a canvas.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Now, months after Mr. Berlusconi\u2019s death at age 86, his heirs are figuring out who gets what in his sprawling empire. Despite the understanding among some of Mr. Berlusconi\u2019s dealer friends that his heirs want to unload the artworks, his family said in a statement that they are in no rush to divide up the estimated 25,000 paintings that one expert who saw the collection believes the mogul spent about $20 million on.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The paintings are now stashed in an enormous hangar that critics have characterized as a sort of Raiders of the Lousy Art warehouse. The rumors of fires in the building are \u201cunfounded,\u201d said the family. They declined a request to visit the site.<\/p>\n Mr. Berlusconi had collected some masters over the years, including pieces by Titian and Parmigianino, and the villa he bought in the 1970s in Arcore, outside of Milan, included a respectable art collection. But his recent acquisitions consisted of less notable works.<\/p>\n He emptied Mr. De Gregorio\u2019s store of around 7,000 paintings and other pieces \u2014 ranging in cost from 100 euros to 2,000 \u2014 mostly buying works on the lower end by living painters. There were street scenes of Paris and Venice, battles and fields of flowers, and lots of Madonnas.<\/p>\n \u201cHe loved Napoleon,\u201d Mr. De Gregorio said, recalling that Mr. Berlusconi bought a painting of the French emperor reading a letter, and showed him that he put the work in a room that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia slept in when he stayed over. The former prime minister did not shy from a colorful palette or an excess of skin. A photo<\/a> of the warehouse published in the Italian media showed a wall of modern day nudes, like a giant calendar of oil-painted Playboy centerfolds.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cA compendium of different genres,\u201d said Lucas Vianini, a televendor, art historian and subsequently reality television personality<\/a>, whom Mr. Berlusconi eventually hired as a live-in curator of the collection.<\/p>\n