The history of the house
Il contesto
The large house in Novate was built by the Testori brothers Giacomo and Edoardo, Giovanni’s father. The two had founded F.lli Testori Filtri e Feltri in Saronno and at the beginning of the century moved the business to Novate where the family factory continues to this day. Between 1908 and 1909 Giacomo built the house where, after the war, his brother Edoardo and wife Lina Paracchi also went to live. From their marriage Giovanni, the third of six siblings, was born in 1923. Around 1933 the expansion of the families prompted Edoardo and Giacomo to expand the villa by having the living room, veranda and bedrooms area built on the second floor. Giovanni Testori lived in this house all his days except for a brief Milanese interlude between 1965 and 1970.
The now empty house housed for years many paintings collected by Giovanni Testori.
What struck a guest upon entering the large house in Novate was the quantity and beauty of paintings that covered its walls. Giovanni Testori was a great collector of ancient and modern paintings, and it was his own method as an art critic that demanded it. When he began to take an interest in a painter he would buy all the paintings he could find, often retrieving them to their author from small antique dealers, junk dealers or furniture makers. Some paintings remained in the house for many years and he only detached himself from them out of economic necessity, but most only lingered for a few years on the walls, time to be studied thoroughly.
1940s - 1960s
In the late 1940s, paintings painted by Testori himself hung on the walls of the house. Testori’s young age is only one of the factors to consider in order to understand why the collection had not yet taken off. Main reason was the fact that in those years Testori’s main activity was not yet as a critic but as a painter. In fact, it would be necessary to wait until the end of the decade for his momentary abandonment of painting, his gravitation around Roberto Longhi and the first exhibitions of ancient art in Piedmont to lead him to begin his atypical activity as a collector.
Thus during the 1950s came masterpieces by Francesco Cairo, Giovan Battista Moroni, Carlo Ceresa, Pier Francesco Guala, Cerano and Giacomo Ceruti… By the early 1960s, the vacant walls of the second floor, in the part of the house inhabited by Giovanni Testori’s family, were completely covered with paintings. Thus it was that, in the dining room, on two walls filled at several levels, dozens of paintings attributed to Giacomo Ceruti and Gustave Courbet faced each other.
1970s
In the 1970s the family home was filled primarily with the works of three contemporary artists with whom Testori had a friendly relationship and who owed much of their fortunes to his critical essays-Jose Jardiel, Willy Varlin and Paolo Vallorz. Virtually every wall was shared among these three painters whose dozens of paintings Testori owned. However, there was no shortage of works by the masters of the twentieth century, some of whom were then virtually unknown in Italy, such as Richard Gerstl, the exponents of the New Objectivity , Francis Gruber and Francis Bacon.
1980s
From the early 1980s Testori had a return to early painting, which led him to collect a few but important paintings that he kept until his final years in his bedroom on the second floor. The ground floor, with the exception of two paintings by Gaudenzio Ferrari and Fra Galgario, was entirely occupied by the works of young painters launched by Testori; among them the “New Ordinators” and in particular Klaus Mehrkens, Thomas Schindler and Herman Albert and the “New Savages,” first and foremost Rainer Fetting.
