The National Gallery of Palazzo Spinola acquires a splendid altarpiece by Anton Maria Vassallo

An important new acquisition for the National Gallery of Palazzo Spinola in Genoa: in fact, the Ligurian museum is enriched with an altarpiece by Anton Maria Vassallo (Genoa, 1617/1618 - Milan, 1660), the Vision and Martyrdom of Blessed Marcello Mastrilli, donated to the museum by owner Maria Angela Profumo, who thus wished to remember her father, engineer Giovanni Battista Profumo. It is also an important painting because it is mentioned in ancient sources: it is mentioned in the Lives of Raffaele Soprani and Carlo Ratti, but it is also mentioned by Federigo Alizeri, who was the first to correctly identify the subject depicted, after deciphering the inscription that is painted on the lower part of the canvas. Alizeri, in 1846, had pointed out the work in the Casa Professa of the Jesuit Fathers attached to the Gesù church in Genoa: the subject recounts the vision of Blessed Marcello Mastrilli, to whom St. Francis Xavier appeared in pilgrim’s clothing, and the subsequent martyrdom by beheading of the blessed.

In inventing this new celebratory iconography, Vassallo, as scholar Gianluca Zanelli notes, probably used as a hagiographic source theIstoria della celeste vocatione, missioni apostoliche, e gloriosa morte del P. Marcello Francesco Mastrilli Indiano felicissimo della Compagnia di Gesù compiled by Father Ignatius Stafford and translated in Italy in Viterbo ne 1642. The dating of the work should therefore be around the early years of the fifth decade of the seventeenth century, as noted as early as 1999 by art historian Anna Orlando, who hypothesized a date “not far therefore also from October 17, 1637 when the blessed Mastrilli died at the age of 37.” Vassallo’s altarpiece, marked by a great sensitivity to naturalistic data and a high degree of attention to detail, is thus situated in the mature phase of his figurative experience, deeply influenced by the Flemish culture that had spread in Genoa at the beginning of the 17th century (Vassallo himself trained at the workshop of the Flemish painter Vincent Malo, long active in Genoa).

The new acquisition by the National Gallery of Palazzo Spinola, which is also important in that it allows for an expansion of the corpus of works by Vassallo already in the museum (where the Saint Rosalie in Glory and the Rest during the Flight into Egypt are already located, will be unveiled on Friday, June 22, 2018, at 5 p.m: the canvas, restored for the occasion at the workshop of Palazzo Reale by Giovanni Sassu with the collaboration of Maddalena Candido, Ludovica Garrone and Emanuela Mignone, will be introduced by Antonio Tarrasco, director of Service I - Museum Collections of the General Directorate for Museums of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism, and Serena Bertolucci, director of Palazzo Reale and the Polo Museale della Liguria. The catalog accompanying the acquisition, giving an account of its critical, chronological and iconographic events, is edited by Gianluca Zanelli and published by Sagep Editori.

The National Gallery of Palazzo Spinola acquires a splendid altarpiece by Anton Maria Vassallo

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