Federico Castelluccio: ‘The Sopranos’ actor who paid $140,000 for a $10m painting
The Sopranos is the most revered series in the history of HBO, and is guaranteed to appear in any television lover’s conversation about the greatest shows ever made, carrying the same reputation of excellence that Citizen Kane or The Godfather has among cinephiles.
It’s a show that people continue to discover and fall in love with, and is destined to be passed along to each subsequent generation, but it would be impossible to talk about without mentioning the late great James Gandolfini, who redefined what a television anti-hero could look like with his highly-celebrated performance as Tony Soprano.
While Tony was a ruthless gangster who would brutalise anyone who betrayed him, he was also a family man with severe mental health issues, which made him a slightly relatable character too. It’s because of Gandolfini’s genius that there became a rise within similar anti-heroes on television in the next decade, such as Bryan Cranston’s Walter White in Breaking Bad, Michael Chiklis’ Vic Mackey in The Shield, Jon Hamm’s Don Draper in Mad Men, and Steve Buscemi’s Nucky Thompson in Boardwalk Empire.
Although his performance is what made the show a smash hit throughout its six seasons, the series benefited from an amazing supporting cast that helped ensure that the world that David Chase had created felt more believable, and among the talented co-stars was Federico Castelluccio as Furio Giunta, a mobster from Italy who becomes part of Tony’s team in America.
Furio was a fascinating character because he was unflinchingly loyal and showed more reverence for tradition than some of his new American allies, but conflict began when he fell in love with Tony’s wife, Carmela, played by Edie Falco, whose marriage was an unhappy one. Given how often Tony sleeps with other women, Carmela doesn’t feel like she would be sinful if she pursued Furio, who actually seemed to care about her.
While Castelluccio found great work outside of The Sopranos, he also pivoted to developing a reputation for being an art collector, being an established painter himself, and purchased what had been initially identified as an “18th-century Italian holy painting of Saint Sebastian” at an auction after first discovering it at the Frankfurt Gallery.
However, after the sale was complete, the painting was confirmed to have been attributed to the Italian Baroque painter Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, who is commonly known as Guercino. Castelluccio had bonded with the art dealer Robert Simon, an expert in Italian Renaissance artwork, who said Castelluccio “had bought a few Baroque paintings” and “made a very professional study of it”.
While approximating the value of such a rare piece is difficult to narrow down, the market for Guercino paintings is immense, with the last major painting of his, Christ and the Woman of Samaria, purchased by the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, for a sum estimated to be around $10million.
Since the new Guercino work now owned by Castelluccio is assumed to be of around the same value, The Sopranos actor will likely never have to work again for the rest of his career, if he doesn’t want to.
