THE architect Andrea Ceresola, called Il Vannone (d.1619), built over an existing city house for the doge of Genoa, transforming it into a grander palace in the 1590s and 1600s. A fire in the 1770s caused much damage, and Simone Cantoni provided a neo-classical façade for the building, shaping the Piazza Matteotti much as it is to this day.
It lies just outside the perimeter of the UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site of 42 palaces, 14 of them on the Strada Nuova, celebrated and made famous by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). Their aristocratic owners, among them the ancient Grimaldi, Lomellini, Balbi, Spinola, and Adorno families, would all vie to be patrons of the younger Flemish artist’s works.
One of the most important paintings in the ducal palace is Van Dyck’s great Crucifixion (c.1627) of the expiring Christ, painted in the last months that the artist was in Italy. It was bought for the collection in 1821. Its provenance is still obscure, but there is no doubting the autograph status of the work, in which the solitary figure on a cross beneath a heavy metallic sky is raked by an unearthly light in the moment of the eclipse (Luke 23.44-45). Although it is only half life-size (124 × 93cm), it transfixes the viewer.
If any excuse to stage this exceptional show was needed, this is it. This is the most comprehensive exhibition of the Flemish-born artist Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) to be staged since the commemorative anniversary exhibitions of 1999, in Antwerp and at the Royal Academy in London (Arts, 24 September 1999).
Archbishopric of OlomoucAnthony Van Dyck, King Charles I of England and his wife Queen Henrietta Mary (1632-34), oil on canvas, 104 × 176cm, on loan from the Archbishopric of Olomouc’s Archdiocesan Museum in Kromeríž, in the Czech Republic
It traces the extraordinary journeying of a precocious artist, the son of a silk merchant in Antwerp, who was one of 12 children. He was apprenticed to the local artist Hendrik van Balen and established his own studio at the age of just 15 when he portrayed himself (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), confidently looking over his right shoulder, his tousled russet hair framing his alert face with carmine-red lips and brown eyes. A single gash of white paint suggests his shirt collar, leaving only the outline of his jacket.
In his self-portrait with a sunflower (private collection), nearly two decades later, the crimson silk of his tunic and gold chain tell their own story of success. He worked alongside Rubens — three of whose paintings are also on show — and was admitted as a master painter in 1618, when he was already selling paintings.
Van Dyck was just 20 when he left Antwerp for London, as a guest of Viscount Purbeck, Master of Robes to James VI & I and brother of the later Duke of Buckingham. He spent the autumn and winter of 1620 in Whitehall and Westminster, before returning to Antwerp and heading to Italy in October 1621.
Genoa as a port city was well known to Flemish merchants and artists, but, notebook in hand, he also travelled to Venice and Rome and on to Palermo where an enforced lockdown across Sicily at the outbreak of the 1624 plague detained him for at least a year before he could return to Genoa. From 1627 to 1631, he was back in Flanders before returning to England.
Dr Anna Orlando, who organised the 2018 Genoese exhibition of Van Dyck and his friends (Palazzo della Meridiana), which demonstrated the contribution of other Flemish artists to the Ligurian courts, and Katlijne Van der Stighelen here bring together more than 50 masterpieces to make the convincing case of the artist as a genius with innovative ideas. Drawn from 32 European museums in 22 cities, the exhibition is assembled in ten thematic rather than chronological sections. It is staged in the Doge’s Apartments and in the palatine chapel.
The Four Ages of Man (Palazzo Chiericati, Vicenza) is as complex as it is moving. The subject of the painting is not known for certain, but it might link human age, the seasons, and mythology: Cupid appears as Spring and represents infancy, Venus Summer and youth, Mars as Autumn and virile middle age, and Saturn turning his withered back on us as Winter and old age. The figure of Venus/Flora has an abundance of roses in her open hand, as ladies in the courts of Whitehall and of Genoa did.
© Musei di Strada Nuova (photo Luigino Visconti)Anthony Van Dyck, Christ Carrying the Cross, PR52, (c.1618-20), board, 66.5 × 51.8 x 4cm, Musei di Strada Nuova, Palazzo Rosso, Genoa
The Spinola family, in whose villa at Rapallo the peace treaty between the kingdoms of Italy and of Yugoslavia was signed after the First World War in 1920, had donated paintings by Guido Reni, Luca Giordano, and Guercino to their local 12th-century village church of San Michele di Pagano.
For the same church, the patrician Francisco Orero commissioned Van Dyck for an altarpiece in 1627. Orero was a wealthy pharmacist and dealer in spices and perfumes. The altarpiece depicts his namesake St Francis with Saint Bernard at the foot of the cross, presenting Orero as the donor. The starkly lit naked torso of the dying Saviour is contrasted with the symphony of understated colours of a swirl of black of the pharmacist’s robes and the brown and the white of the two habits.
In 1985, the National Gallery purchased a triple portrait (NG 6502) of three expensively dressed young brothers in scarlet, crimson, silver, and black satins, velvets, and brocades, a worthy addition to the Trafalgar Square of a Van Dyck.
Formerly known as the Balbi children, as the painting had once been in the ownership of that family, the painting is presented here with a new attribution; recent scholarship has established that it came from another prominent family: they are in fact the brothers Giustiniani Longo, Alessandro (1617-74), Vincenzo (1619-post 1690) and Francesco Maria (1624-post 1651). Again, it is a work dating to the artist’s last year in Genoa.
Ten years later, Van Dyck portrayed the Princes Palatine, Charles Louis I (1617-80), and his brother Robert (1619-82), sons of the exiled Winter Queen and the Elector Palatine (The Louvre). The same ages as Alessandro and Vincenzo, these are handsome men of the jeunesse dorée, nephews of Henrietta Maria and Charles I. They were keen to leave London, where they had lived from 1635 to fight against Germany to regain the Palatinate, and their uncle commissioned the double portrait before they left for war. Charles Louis would regain part of the Palatinate in 1648; a year later, his uncle was put to death on the Whitehall scaffold.
“Van Dyck, the European: The Journey of a Genius from Antwerp to Genoa and London” is at the Palazzo Ducale, Piazza Matteotti, Genoa, Italy, until 19 July.
palazzoducale.genova.it