The Genoese Seventeenth Century. Artists, masterpieces, origins and development

The period between about 1528 and 1630 has gone down in history as the century of the Genoese: the Republic of Genoa in fact in this era, in addition to confirming its role as the crossroads of maritime traffic between East and West, had seen its weight in European politics grow considerably (Genoese banks had granted large loans to Spain for its colonial policy) and had become a very important artistic center of European significance. Genoa, in fact, was a center in which trends were experimented with and through which transited several of the greatest artists of the time, of all nationalities (of particular note are Orazio Gentileschi, Pieter Paul Rubens, Antoon van Dyck, and Mattia Preti).

The growth of Genoese wealth led to a sumptuous urban renewal of the city, most evident in the Strada Nuova (today’s Via Garibaldi) and its neighboring streets, where the city’s most powerful and influential families (such as the Spinola, Doria, Brignole, Adorno, and Grimaldi) had their sumptuous dwellings built, which went on to constitute the so-called Rolli system. The term “rolli” in particular indicated the rankings of families who could host, at their residences, important foreign dignitaries (ambassadors, princes... ) who passed through Genoa. Consequently, in order to show their guests the prestige of their lineage, Genoese families competed to create the most opulent residences, which were often decorated by the most important artists in the city.

From Andrea Doria to the height of the Genoese Baroque.

The preconditions for this important development of the Republic of Genoa are to be found in the very year 1528, when Admiral Andrea Doria ended the French influence over Genoa, which had lasted about thirty years, to join the Emperor Charles V, thus placing Genoa under the Spanish orbit. It was in 1528, by the way, that Genoa became a republic. Until then, in fact, the Genoese political organization was the so-called Compagna Communis, which came into being at the end of the 11th century: it was a kind of federation of compagnae, which were city associations, mainly commercial, but also endowed with a military character. Thus the Republic of Genoa, by becoming an ally of Spain, which was greatly expanding its dominions in the New World, secured for itself a century of peace and prosperity during which it was able to control all Mediterranean trade and, thanks to the activity of its banks, to move considerable flows of wealth. The crisis that began beginning in the fourth decade of the seventeenth century, coinciding with Spain’s loss of prestige internationally, would lead to the end of the Republic’s independence in 1797 (the same year in which Venice also lost its independence).

Artistic stimuli had already begun under Andrea Doria, who hosted some of the most important Mannerist painters in Genoa, such as Domenico Beccafumi, Perin del Vaga, and the Pordenone (just to list the best-known names). These artists were joined by Luca Cambiaso, who was the leading exponent of the local art school during the 16th century and initiated a successful late Mannerist school that saw such personalities as Lazzaro Tavarone (Genoa, 1556 1640) and Bernardo Castello (Genoa, 1557 - 1629) flourish. However, the artist with whom the Genoese seventeenth century can be said to have been inaugurated is Bernardo Strozzi (Genoa, 1581 - Venice, 1644), an eclectic artist who trained in the workshop of Pietro Sorri, a Sienese Mannerist painter active, however, in Genoa in the late sixteenth century.

The first generation of seventeenth-century Genoese artists.

Able to filter suggestions from a variety of environments, some very different from each other, Bernardo Strozzi first approached the quiet devotional art of the Counter-Reformation (an approach dictated by the fact that Bernardo Strozzi himself was a friar, so much so that he is also known by nicknames such as “the Capuchin” or “the Genoese priest”), but he immediately knew how to revisit it in a completely original way according to a naturalism that he had learned from analyzing the art of Orazio Gentileschi and probably that of Caravaggio as well (thanks to a probable stay in Rome by the artist, a stay about which, however, there is no certain information). All of this was enriched by the fullness and cheerfulness of the forms of the Dutch Baroque painting of Rubens and van Dyck (both of whom were present in Genoa, and moreover Rubens was particularly impressed by the Palazzi dei Rolli: read an in-depth study on the history of the palaces here), which exerted a deep fascination on Bernardo Strozzi. A typical example of this art is the Madonna and Child with Saint John (ca. 1620, Genoa, Palazzo Rosso). Capable of painting intense sacred scenes but also vivid portraits of commoners (such as La cuoca (c. 1625, Genoa, Palazzo Rosso)), the artist also approached the study of Venetian chromaticism, especially Titianism, during his stay in Venice.

Another artist who was fascinated by Flemish painting, albeit in a different way, was Sinibaldo Scorza (Voltaggio, 1589 - Genoa, 1631): in fact, if Bernardo Strozzi had looked to the more sumptuous and opulent Dutch Baroque painting, Sinibaldo Scorza turned instead to genre and landscape painting, which had found in Frans Snyders, present in Genoa in the first decade of the seventeenth century, the main reference figure. Sinibaldo Scorza in particular developed the naturalistic component of Dutch art by elaborating a genre of painting in which animals were the protagonists. This original type of painting, which found wide appreciation in Genoese circles, and which gave importance to animals even in episodes where they were not the protagonists but in which their presence was justified (such as stories taken from mythology or the Bible, for example, Noah’s Sacrifice, c. 1605-1630, Genoa, Palazzo Rosso), was further developed by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione known as il Grechetto (Genoa, 1609 - Mantua, 1664), who, however, was also able to give his art moral and philosophical connotations that were not negligible.

The art of Domenico Fiasella (Sarzana, 1589 - Genoa, 1669) started from the same Caravaggesque suggestions that distinguished that of Bernardo Strozzi, but instead of reinterpreting them according to the Dutch Baroque language, Fiasella preferred to mediate them through the influences of seventeenth-century classicism, especially that of Domenichino, which the artist from Sarzana deepened during a youthful stay in Rome. Returning to Sarzana and then moving to Genoa, Fiasella knew how to combine Caravaggesque instances and classicist refinement in a homogeneous and harmonious way (San Lazzaro chiede alla Madonna la protezione per la città di Sarzana, 1616, Sarzana, San Lazzaro). This style of his somewhere between classicism and naturalism was so successful in Genoa that his workshop was among the most prolific and fruitful of the time.

Different results were achieved, on the other hand, by the art of Gioacchino Assereto (Genoa, 1600 1649), who was certainly the most powerful of the Genoese painters of the early 17th century because he led his reflection on the drama and theatricality of the emerging Baroque art: his language is characterized by the depiction of very vigorous figures and highly charged expressions and moods, almost bordering on the grotesque, going so far in some cases as to arouse a sense of revulsion in the viewer(The Philistines Blind Samson, c. 1630, Barcelona, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya). All this was then accentuated by a Caravaggesque-style luminism that particularly highlighted the tragic and dramatic situations in his paintings. To the same generation belonged Giovanni Andrea De Ferrari (Genoa, 1598 - 1669), who instead felt the influence of Bernardo Strozzi and knew how to rework it in forms marked by a certain delicate intimism, of Caravaggio matrix but devoid of drama and marked by calm tones. Slightly older, on the other hand, was Luciano Borzone (Genoa 1590 - 1645), who was trained on the achievements of the painting of artists such as Cesare Corte, Giulio Cesare Procaccini and Giovanni Battista Paggi: he was, however, also attracted to Caravaggio’s painting, which particularly influenced his art from the 1530s onward, making him, along with Gioacchino Assereto, the most interesting of the naturalist painters active in Genoa.

The Genoese Baroque

It was at Domenico Fiasella’s workshop that Valerio Castello (Genoa, 1624 - 1659), son of the Bernardo pupil of Luca Cambiaso, trained. Valerio Castello was an artist who, despite a very short life, was of considerable importance in seventeenth-century painting in Genoa as he was the first fully Baroque artist the city knew. His style started from the mixture of classicism and naturalism typical of Fiasella, but he was able to update it according to a tendency toward the charged and accentuated dynamism typical of the Baroque (a dynamism that Valerio Castello had learned from the lesson of Rubens). This mixture found its definitive fulfillment in Castello’s art especially in his fresco works, characterized by those quadratures that found wide use in the great Baroque decoration that in those years was being practiced especially in Rome and of which Valerio Castello was the first exponent in Liguria(read here an in-depth study of Valerio Castello’s frescoes in Palazzo Balbi Senarega).

Parallel to Valerio Castello’s research was the art of Giovanni Andrea Ansaldo (Voltri, 1584 - Genoa, 1638): an artist who throughout his career was characterized by his adherence to Counter-Reformation instances updated, however, on the model of Bernardo Strozzi and the Flemish painters present in Genoa. Toward the end of his career, in the last three years of his life, Ansaldo was the author of a resounding turn in the Baroque direction, which, however, looked more to the art of Giovanni Lanfranco than to that of Pietro da Cortona: his main work, the fresco decoration of the dome of the church of Santissima Annunziata del Vastato in Genoa, bases its illusionistic layout on the vision of light and air according to a procedure typical of the Emilian artist.

The artistic lines inaugurated by Castello and Ansaldo were then developed by almost all the artists of the next generation, who enriched the churches and noble palaces of Genoa with frescoes characterized by strong scenographic installations devoted to theatricality and spectacularity. Chief among this large group of artists was Domenico Piola (Genoa, 1627 - 1703), who, after Valerio Castello, was probably the most interesting Baroque painter in Genoa. Piola initiated a style based on whimsical compositional vivacity that essentially continued that of Valerio Castello, whose collaborator Domenico Piola was also. Domenico Piola’s importance was also more strictly academic, as he collected a considerable amount of drawings that constituted copies of the works of the great masters, and he circulated these works among his students so as to spur them to copy and imitate them in turn. An artist who, on the other hand, was directly influenced by the suggestions of an important painter such as Giovan Battista Gaulli known as Baciccio (who, although Genoese, was never active in his city but in Rome), was Giovanni Andrea Carlone (Genoa, 1639 - 1697). An exponent of an important dynasty of artists originally from Canton Ticino, he made Gaulli’s language his own with fresco elements that transcended the architectures of quadratura to achieve outcomes of greater spectacularity(Allegory of the Life of Man, 1691-1692, Genoa, Palazzo Rosso).

The Genoese Seventeenth Century. Artists, masterpieces, origins and development

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