Genoa, the great masters of art from the 1500s to the 1700s in an exhibition at the Royal Palace

The exhibition Highlights. Masters from the 1500s to the 1700s from the National Museums of Genoa is on display until September 24, 2023, in the Falcone Theater of the Royal Palace and is dedicated to the heritage of the collections of the National Museums of Genoa, with more than forty works by great artists such as Joos van Cleve, Tintoretto, Orazio Gentileschi, Antoon van Dyck, Guercino, Grechetto, and Bernardo Strozzi, five of which are recent purchases of the Ministry of Culture and exhibited for the first time.

The title Highlights stems from the desire to highlight the masterpieces of the National Museums’ collections, as the chosen graphics and guiding image also emphasizes. The works, extracted from the historical rooms of the two palaces where they are kept, are put in dialogue to allow visitors to observe them up close and appreciate their details and connections.

The exhibition, curated by Alessandra Guerrini, Luca Leoncini, Anna Manzitti, and Gianluca Zanelli, thus aims to emphasize the belonging of these masterpieces to autonomous yet connected histories, united by the thousand threads of art history and the vicissitudes of collecting.

The paintings and sculptures on display in the Teatro del Falcone will allow the visitor to dwell on extraordinary works of the most varied provenance: the collections of the National Museums of Genoa are in fact the result of a collection, generation after generation, of Flemish, Venetian, Bolognese, Neapolitan, and Roman paintings.

Narrative captions and a special itinerary for children will offer content that historical displays do not allow.

In parallel, nineteen works by artists of the second half of the twentieth century will be exhibited in the rooms of the Piano nobile of the Royal Palace, taking the place of the ancient works presented in the exhibition. Contemporary insertions of works granted by private collectors propose unprecedented dialogues with historical collections. The project, entitled WE LINKED PASSAGES. Maestri del ’900 dalle collezioni private genovesi, curated by Leo Lecci with Luca Leoncini and Anna Manzitti,presents thirteen artists representative of movements on the international scene, six Italians and seven foreigners, extracting their works from a heritage as important as it is unknown to the general public.

Not all the masterpieces, of course, are in the exhibition: many remain in their places in the rooms: the itinerary closes with an invitation to return to see them inside the two palaces. At Palazzo Spinola, in particular, they will continue to be visible in a temporary arrangement even during the completion work on some of the technological installations planned for the summer months, which will impose a brief closure of the upper floors.

The exhibition comes on the seventh anniversary of the elevation of Palazzo Reale and Palazzo Spinola to autonomous institution of the Ministry of Culture. To mark this important transition, a new name, logo, and coordinated visual identity system was chosen in 2022 that also makes explicit the presence of two distinct collections at Palazzo Spinola, that of the historic home and that of the National Gallery of Liguria. Thus were born the National Museums of Genoa. The two museums together present a heritage that has endless internal cross-references, just as the families of the city’s merchant aristocracy, one of the very few in Italy to have remained a republic for centuries, were connected. The Royal Palace is a vast architectural complex that occupies an entire block in the ancient medieval quarter of Pré. The seventeenth-century mansion was founded in 1643 by Stefano Balbi and his son Giovan Battista, then passed in 1679 to Eugenio Durazzo, who enlarged it to its present size with work that was in fact completed after his death in the first decade of the eighteenth century. The rooms are decorated with splendor and house collections of the first magnitude: not only ancient and modern paintings and sculptures, but also sumptuous furnishings, tapestries, fine fabrics, collections of decorative arts, books, drawings and prints. Partly because of its size, the value of its interiors, the presence of a theater, its proximity to one of the city gates and the port, the palace was purchased in 1824 by Charles Felix of Savoy and transformed with major works into the Genoese seat of first the kings of Sardinia and then the kings of Italy. The picture gallery-one of the largest and most important of the ancient Republic of Genoa-is composed mainly of works arriving from the two founding families, the Balbi and the Durazzo, to which the Savoy added paintings transferred from the deposits of the Piedmontese royal palaces and from a local collection purchased by the Royal House in 1821 for the purpose of decorating the first apartment set up for the sovereign. Palazzo Spinola, set in the heart of the historic center, contains within it two distinct museum souls: the Spinola’s ancient collection and the collection formed since the 1950s with new acquisitions by the Ministry of Culture. The mansion is founded at the end of the sixteenth century by Francesco Grimaldi, then after just one generation passed to the Pallavicino family, later to the Doria family, and finally to the Spinola family, first from the branch of San Luca and finally, from 1824, from the branch of Luccoli. The museum opened its doors in 1959 thanks to the donation of the brothers Franco and Paolo Spinola to the Italian State of the entire building and all its contents, with the precise stipulation that the noble floors should maintain the appearance of an’ancient Genoese aristocratic residence, while the third and fourth floors, destroyed in a ruinous fire during World War II, were to house the National Gallery of Liguria, which today is composed not only of works acquired thanks to state funding, but also the donations and deposits that, thanks to the generosity of a number of private individuals, allow the public enjoyment of valuable works of art.

The exhibition opens and closes with two highlights now preserved in the spaces of the National Gallery of Liguria in Palazzo Spinola, but which belonged in the past to the owners of the palace we now call Reale. An example of the dense web of contacts that linked Genoese nobility, artists, and city picture galleries through histories that have over time often inextricably intertwined. The opening is with Filippo Parodi’s statue of Adonis and Love from Palazzo Spinola (marble, c. 1685), while the closing is with Anton von Maron’s painting, Portrait of Maria Francesca (Cicchetta) Durazzo from Palazzo Spinola (oil on canvas, 1792). In between are several thematic sections: Sixteenth century, the section that houses works testifying to the fortunes of the great Genoese families in the sixteenth century, as well as the oldest paintings in the Palazzo Reale picture gallery, two portions of a triptych from the region of Bruges fully in keeping with the taste that would favor the entry of similar works in churches and on the private altars of Genoese residences; seventeenth century, with paintings that testify to the force of two innovative approaches that marked seventeenth-century painting, that of Caravaggio’s naturalism and that which sprang from the genius of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, which we know today by the term Baroque (the revolution of the natural is represented here by three great protagonists of seventeenth-century painting, who responded in different ways to Caravaggio’s extraordinary parable: Giovanni Francesco Barbieri of Emilia, known as Guercino, the Tuscan Orazio Gentileschi, and the Flemish Gerrit van Honthorst); Seventeenth-Century Genoa, where four white marble statues by Filippo Parodi, the leading Genoese sculptor of the seventeenth century, and paintings by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione known as Grechetto to Gregorio De Ferrari, Bartolomeo Guidobono to Domenico Piola, can be seen in the center of the room; Portraits, all dedicated to portraiture with works by Bernardo Strozzi, Antoon van Dyck, Giovanni Bernardo Carbone, Gioacchino Assereto and other great artists; Raptures, with dedicated two scenic canvases, the Rape of Proserpine by Valerio Castello and the Rape of the Sabine Women by Orazio De Ferrari; Eighteenth century, the epilogue of the exhibition with late 18th century portraiture, represented by the Viennese Anton von Maron.

For all information, you can visit the official website of the National Museums of Genoa.

Genoa, the great masters of art from the 1500s to the 1700s in an exhibition at the Royal Palace

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