Antoon Van Dyck, the portraits of Paola Adorno Brignole-Sale, 1627 (left) and Agostino Pallavicino as ambassador to the pontiff, 1621 or 1627 (right). (Strada Nuova Museums – Palazzo Rosso and Getty’s Open Content Program)
The uniqueness of the Genoese baroque, so varied from a stylistic and iconographic point of view, reflects the political, social and economic exceptionality of the Ligurian republic between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
Genoa, the Superba, was a republic like Venice but there the doge was in office for only two years and was elected from the ranks of a very rich nobility characterized by considerable social mobility.
A financial superpower
Finance, among the rivers of silver that came from the Americas, speculations and credits with the greatest kingdoms of Europe, was the nervous system of the republic. The Casa di San Giorgio, later Banco di San Giorgio, was founded in 1407 and was, to all intents and purposes, the first major European international bank. Being an emanation from the same aristocracy that ruled the republic, it was almost a parallel state, the long financial arm of a small and voracious mercantile state.
From 1528 Genoa was in the Spanish sphere of influence and soon became the first creditor of the empire: the Genoese bankers financed the Spanish crown and were repaid, with interest, in silver. Territorially tiny, perched between the mountains and the sea, Genoa for a century and a half financed international wars and colonial enterprises, accumulating an extraordinary wealth.
The exhibition SUPERBArocco (a play on words between “Superba”, the name of the maritime republic, and “Baroque”), set up at the Scuderie del Quirinale, in Rome, tries to reconstruct the taste of a very rich oligarchy, both provincial and international, but always aware of their difference.
The Roman exhibition opens with a spectacular altarpiece by the Flemish master Pieter Paul Rubens, The miracles of Blessed Ignatius of Loyolawhich gives a sense of the eccentricity of the Genoese taste of the early seventeenth century.
Rubens arrived in 1606 and for a few years worked closely with the local aristocracy. The altarpiece with the miracles of Saint Ignatius arrives in Genoa from Antwerp, later, in 1620, and makes us understand how much Rubens had made the local taste his own: the scene is theatrical, the saint acts as an intermediary with his gesture and his look between heaven and earth, between the Holy Spirit and the suffering humanity that swarms below him: we see a possessed woman held by three men and a desperate mother with her dead child. Rubens inserts the scene within a sumptuous classical foreshortened architecture, and the gestures of the characters are measured: the scene is excited but the figures move in space with the measured elegance of a dance.
Rubens succeeds, in order to satisfy the tastes of his clients, to create a stately and monumental work but at the same time full of life and flesh: Flemish realism on a solid classicist and Italian framework. Crossing the other rooms of the exhibition you can see how the Genoese baroque mixed styles and iconographic ideas with great freedom. In the large room dedicated to the portraiture of the Flemish Antoon van Dyck, a pupil of Rubens active in Genoa between 1621 and 1627, we see how the Genoese nobility loved to be represented: always full-length, like the popes and emperors. Flemish realism gives sheen and materiality to precious fabrics, laces and jewels; the poses and haughty looks are those of an aristocracy accustomed to dealing directly with the powerful of the earth.
Silvers, birds and divinities
Another characteristic of the Genoese Baroque is the attention to genre painting, popular market scenes or crafts and sumptuous still lifes borrowed from the Dutch tradition, with triumphs of fruit, vegetables and game.
On display there is a cornerstone of this kind of painting: the so-called Cook that the Genoese Bernardo Strozzi, a high-ranking priest as well as an appreciated painter, painted in 1625. A young maid intent on plucking a goose stops to cast a sly look at the spectator. Around her a large number of chickens, quails and other birds, a lit hearth and a luxurious silver jug.
Beyond its meaning, perhaps an alchemical representation of the four elements, the painting is a piece of pictorial virtuosity, all played on full-bodied brushstrokes of earth, ocher and gray, with a brilliant note of red for the coral necklace worn by the woman. .
The ability of the Genoese Baroque to absorb elements from Flemish art, Tuscan-Roman classicism and Venetian luminism with creativity and freedom explodes in the large (218×316 cm) mythological painting Sacrifice to Pan, built around 1640 by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, known as Grechetto. Here too the classicism of ancient architecture becomes pure scenography for a mythological scene which in its monstrosity (the realistic goat legs of Pan, stretched out on his altar as if he were at a banquet) takes on very human, almost everyday contours. The offerings to the god (ears of wheat, flowers and the usual game) and the great variety of live animals painted in the smallest detail (cows, goats and sheep) are pages of vivid realism in a mythological context that has no realistic or breaking latest news. nothing.
After an excursus on the wall painting of noble palaces reconstructed through sketches and preparatory drawings, the exhibition ends with an amazing room dedicated to the nocturnal and hallucinatory painting of Alessandro Magnasco, the last great interpreter of Genoese painting in the eighteenth century. His feverish landscapes, populated by barely hinted at and deformed figures, historically correspond to the rapid economic and military decline of the Republic of Genoa.
As the fortune of the Superba dwindled into the dark skies and tangled forests of Magnasco, Venice, the rival maritime republic, died more sweetly looking at Tiepolo’s wide-open pink and golden skies.
This article appeared in issue 23 of the Essential, page 22. Subscribe