“Silvio Berlusconi’s light-hearted dalliance with a television starlet whom he subsequently appointed to his cabinet has been made the subject of an oil painting in which both are shown in the nude. … The artist, Filippo Panseca, made his name in the 1980s as the designer of colossal, pharaonic stage sets for the conventions of the Socialist Party under Mr Berlusconi’s then patron, Bettino Craxi.”