A Meaty, Tasty Look at Baroque Genoa at Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale

Expansive and rich, Superbarocco is long overdue.

G enoa, called “La Superba,” or the Proud One, was among the Mediterranean’s powers from the twelfth century until 1797, when Napoleon smote it, Venice, and most everything in his path. Superbarocco at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome considers the city’s legacy in art from Rubens and Van Dyck starting around 1610 to the weird and wacky Alessandro Magnasco in the 1730s.

Overall, it’s a splendid survey of the twists and turns in Baroque painting in one place. Genoa wasn’t a high-pressure art town like, say, New York, where a hip style can kill everything counter to it. In places where the business of life is making money, varieties of tastes and looks can exist.

Peter Paul Rubens’s Portrait of Giovanni Carlo Doria on Horseback, from 1606, introduces the exhibition and is worth a visit in itself. It shares a gallery with Rubens’s Miracles of the Beatified Ignatius of Loyola, an altarpiece from 1619, and Saint Sebastian Cured by Saint Irene, by the French painter Simon Vouet, from 1622. It’s an odd, compelling mix but makes sense. Art history conveniently bookends the Scuderie’s task. Nothing much happened in Genoa before Rubens or after Magnasco.

Doria (1576–1625) was the son and brother of Genoese doges, very rich, and Genoa’s premiere art collector. He’s the catalyst in Genoa’s aesthetic evolution from flush and unsophisticated to flush and, though never avant-garde, at least à la mode and grasping after an art to call its own. Rubens was Doria’s contemporary. He was in Italy to work and study from 1600 and 1608, having already gotten a name for himself in Antwerp, and he spent more than a little time in Genoa painting for the monied locals.

Vouet (1590–1649) worked for Doria, too. Like Rubens, he was an up-and-comer in Italy both to learn what was new in Bologna, Venice, Rome, and Naples and to get painting gigs along the way. In Genoa, both artists got good lines on their CVs and left, Vouet to work for French kings, Rubens for royalty all over the map as a painter and diplomat.

Genoa, a port city, was open to outsiders. For Doria, the artsy one in the family, that meant the welcome sign was out for the Flemish Rubens and the French Vouet. This positioned Genoa to develop a local style that drew from lots of places but added its own special sauce. Another hat tip to foreign style is Doria’s Spanish swag. He’d just been admitted, courtesy of King Philip III, to Spain’s Order of St. James of the Sword. Doria, though not a titled aristocrat, felt this entitled him to the equestrian setting normally reserved to kings, dukes, and generals. Rubens, in Spain before Genoa, had just done an equestrian portrait of the Duke of Lerma, Philip’s prime minister.

Nobody paints horseflesh like Rubens. Stubbs might be anatomically and topographically perfect, but Rubens’s horses are Seabiscuit after a doppio espresso. Rubens also painted The Circumcision of Christ for the Church of the Jesus and the Saints Ambrogio and Andrea in Genoa. It’s not in the exhibition. It’s still in situ and an astonishingly vast thing considering it’s about Jesus’s baby-boy parts. The show makes a good case that it’s the first Baroque altarpiece in Italy. Radical things sometimes happen when young artists arrive from someplace else in a time of artistic ferment where there’s no establishment enforcing entrenched styles.

It’s not a huge problem, but I think the exhibition misses two things at the beginning. I say this having come from the teaching-museum world. Call me persnickety, but I like timelines and, let’s face it, Italians might be as clueless as Americans when it comes to their history. I’d give Genoa circa 1600 more than a few words.

I’d also define “Baroque” as a style. Baroque style emphasizes drama through intense light, deep shadows, dynamism, you-are-there immediacy, and true-to-nature figures. It’s emotion and passion, not reason and no frills. Think Errol Flynn, Anna Magnani, and Indiana Jones. Drawing on last week’s story about golden-age Hollywood, I’d say that Rhett Butler is Baroque. Ashley Wilkes isn’t.

Doria’s patronage and inquisitiveness stimulated young Italian artists such as Bernardo Strozzi, Giulio Cesare Procaccini, Giovanni Battista Paggi, Gioacchino Assereto, and Giovanni Andrea Ansaldo. Classifying them is a chore, but the Scuderie gives us sections on what it calls a new naturalism, still life, mysticism, the distinct Genoese style of Domenico Piola and Gregorio de’ Ferrari in the late 1600s, sculpture, ceilings, and Magnasco.

There are many pieces in this puzzle. Caravaggio is one of them, though he’s missing. That’s a shame since a big part of Genoa’s aesthetic development revolves around how local artists responded to Caravaggio. Rubens might have painted Italy’s first Baroque altarpiece, but it’s, in part, a coincidence. Caravaggio’s and Annibale Carracci’s altarpieces for Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome were done earlier, around 1601, but not installed until 1606. The fact is that Caravaggio was the Picasso of his day. Every Italian artist was aware of him and responded to him.

One of Caravaggio’s last paintings, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, from 1610, belonged to Marcantonio Doria, Giovanni Carlo Doria’s brother. It was painted in Naples just before Caravaggio made his failed, fateful trip to Rome, dying en route on a beach in Tuscany. Marcantonio’s agent snapped it up. Unlike Caravaggio, the picture actually made it to its destination. It lived in Genoa until the 1650s.

How does Strozzi (1584–1644) deal with Caravaggio? He surely knows about Caravaggio’s raking light amid inky darks. Strozzi’s Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist, from the late 1610s, is Caravaggio-steeped. The Cook, from 1625, though, isn’t. There, Strozzi’s looking at Flemish and Dutch still life. It’s his own synthesis, though, since his palette is uniquely his, and his handling of paint, which I can only call lush, is his. Strozzi’s vision is Giancarlo Doria’s, too, or they overlap. Doria commissioned The Cook. And this cook isn’t rolling pasta. The picture’s an allegory of the Four Elements, as much Northern as it is Italian, and a measure of Doria’s and Strozzi’s heterodoxy and the fluidity of Genoese tastes.

And Strozzi is even more various. He designed sumptuous silver. He did multi-figure ceiling paintings, such as Paradise, from 1621, depicting a vision of Saint Dominic. It’s organized grandeur à la Cecil B. DeMille. The building where the ceiling lived was demolished in the 1820s, but Strozzi’s modello, nearly six feet tall, is fantastic. And, by the late 1620s, his patron Doria having died, Strozzi left Genoa for Venice and didn’t return. Strozzi was a Capuchin monk who, for reasons we don’t know, fell afoul of his superiors and left the order. He didn’t exactly flee Genoa and never saw himself as an exile. Rather, he found in Genoa a place so small that finding a new clique after alienating an old one wasn’t easy. There’s no chance at reinvention.

Another font of outside influence is Van Dyck. Rubens’s best student, Van Dyck (1599–1641) had just turned 21 when he came to Genoa for painting jobs. Like Vouet, he found in Genoa a lucrative perch while studying Italian portraiture. He stayed in Italy for six years and painted about 20 portraits for Genoese aristocrats and lots of religious pictures, too. Four portraits are in the exhibition. I’d be happiest if all of Van Dyck’s Genoese portraits were there, since I love them so much.

Van Dyke’s portrait of Marchesa Elena Grimaldi Cattaneo from 1623 is owned by the National Gallery in Washington. It’s one of my favorite portraits anywhere. She defines sangfroid, or sangue freddo, I think, the Italians would call it. She’s got poise, and the fact that she has a little black attendant holding a red parasol says she’s to the manor born. No, it doesn’t have the testosterone of Rubens’s Doria picture, obviously, but neither do Van Dyck’s portraits of Anton Giulio Brignole-Sale, from 1627, another equestrian portrait, and of Agostino Pallavicini, from 1621–23. They’re swagger portraits, to be sure, but Van Dyck presents his Genoese aristocrats as so well bred, so self-assured, that they can gambol like gazelles and not rumble like King Kong.

Genoese artists during the rest of the 1600s seem to spring from Caravaggio for realism and from Van Dyck for swagger. They love vivid, juicy colors, higher-octane colors than the Venetians, and have a taste for esoteric storylines. I’d never heard of Luciano Borzone (1570–1645), but his Rosamond’s Feast, from the late 1630s, is one smashing thing. Rosamond, the daughter of a dead Gepid king, is ordered by her husband, a Langobard king, to drink from a cup made from her father’s skull. Kinky and awkward, to say the least, though her husband is beautifully painted as a bastard in red. Ansaldo’s (1584–1638) Esther before Ahasuerus is a symphony of red, orange, crimson, and purple. Though Esther’s marriage to Ahasuerus doesn’t involve a drinking game where the mugs are family members, Esther is a Genoese cult figure.

There’s a nice section on the styles of Gregorio de’ Ferrari (1647–1726) and Domenico Piola (1627–1703). The Scuderie’s story is simplified by the plague’s return in 1656 and 1657, killing many artists and inspiring others to flee. These two, the exhibition tells us, are left to rule the roost. I’m such a provincial and Americanist, academically, that I didn’t know either of them. They paint fluid compositions with elastic rather than sculptural figures and a warm, saturated palette. Ferrari’s Death of Saint Scholastica, from around 1700, is certainly fluid but like a cascading waterfall. Piola’s Annunciation, from 1679, another big altarpiece from Genoa come-to-Rome, is a complicated swirl but beautifully choreographed. Both pictures are turbulent but refined, with a swagger-religion look.

Exhibitions that try, in a museum setting, to evoke vast ceiling cycles someplace else sometimes work, and sometimes don’t. The Scuderie succeeds through elaborate, detailed bozzetti that are human-scale and on the wall in front of us, so there are no calls to Rome’s EMT service for excessive neck craning. Piola’s study for Coronation of the Virgin, a big cupola ceiling painting in Genoa from 1695, is lovely. These models by Piola and Ferrari, hives of activity and illusionistic, are painterly, so they’re luscious, too.

I was very happy to see them and would have left content if the exhibition ended here. These paintings evoke the big ceiling spaces into which they evolved, and Piola and Ferrari aren’t the only artists to have painted up a storm. Giovanni Battista Carlone’s bozzetti for the Basilica of San Siro are fantastic and fortified by a projection of the actual ceiling on the gallery ceiling.

A smashing conclusion could have been made with these along with big sculptures by Puget and especially by Anton Maria Maragliano, whose polychrome Baptism of Christ, from 1723, seems to come to life. I think the Scuderie decided it wanted to do something with Magnasco. It might have thought that ending with bozzetti and sculpture would be a fizzle. Hierarchies, after all, still love.

They raise a question, though. Is Superbarocco an exhibition that can be experienced and absorbed only in Genoa? A few years ago, I reviewed the big Tintoretto retrospective in Venice and, a few months later, a version of it at the National Gallery in Washington. I felt that a Tintoretto retrospective, or at least a proper one, could happen only in Venice. There were too many foundational things, like the 80 or so Tintorettos in the Scuola San Rocco or the huge pictures decorating his funeral chapel, that can’t move. Though the exhibition was at the Ducal Palace and the Accademia, the reality was that all of Venice was implicated, and the assumption was that art lovers needed to haul themselves to a least three or four other spots to make sense of the artist.

Is this the case here? Maybe. I’ve been to Genoa twice before, both in the 1980s, once to see art and once for a Frank Sinatra concert. I happened to be in Liguria and wanted to see the old crooner-turned-croaker. Art-wise, there’s still a lot of art in Genoa by all the Superbarocco stars , in museums, churches, and palaces. Now educated in Genoese art, I want to go back. That said, the Scuderie does a thorough job.

In every gallery there’s one or two oval panels projecting from the wall with text treating a single word that’s relevant to the exhibition, though not necessarily that specific gallery. Together, this nice addition is called Fifty Superb Words. Think of them as fun facts. Oh, and they’re alphabetized. “A for Accademia del Disegno” describes Genoa’s best school for art education. That’s good to know. Some are too open-ended, such as “C for Clergy,” and some, like “N for Notaries,” are irrelevant. I learned about Genoese banking but also the city’s relations with Milan, Bologna, and even Corsica.

Superbarocco ends with Magnasco. I’d say you’ll never go wrong with Magnasco (1667–1749) except Superbarocco does, though his work is dazzling, enigmatic, little known to Americans, and worth seeing even if it’s an awkward fit. Though born in Genoa in 1667 and dying there in 1749, he spent most of his career in Milan except for two spans when he worked in Florence. He retired to Genoa. Magnasco is an outlier in any Italian tradition. In a way, that makes him eligible to end Superbarocco, since Genoese art is mostly a fizzle by, say, 1700.

Jonathan Bober’s very, very good essay on Magnasco in the catalogue makes the case that, for all his individualism, he’s genuinely Genoese. His father was a Genoese painter set smack in the style of Piola, Ferrari, and Valerio Castello, another heavy-hitting local. In keeping with Genoese tradition, Magnasco is an inveterate transactionalist. He takes this and that from French and Dutch contemporary art and from strains of Italian art, too. Eccentricity is Genoa’s calling card, too, and Magnasco is eccentric indeed.

Whenever I see a Magnasco painting, I’ll look at it closely because his work’s so weird. His figures are spidery, with skinny legs, arms, and torsos not so much animated by flashes of light as agitated by them. He paints conventional religious scenes but mostly he does beggars, monks, thieves, gypsies, hermits, and, strange for any period, Quaker meetings, Jewish funerals, and inquisitions.

Some have the whiff of apocalypse. Exorcism of the Waves is at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, N.Y. If the sea’s so agitated that it needs an exorcism, it’s no day for the beach. That said, it’s so weird that it’s the thing of a bad dream and not what I’d call a disaster picture. The Met in New York owns a Magnasco, The Tame Magpie, in which a beggar tries to teach a magpie to sing. It’s wonderful and comic, as futility is often funny.

I’ve never looked at him as a Baroque artist. These broad classifications — the three topical ones here are Baroque, Rococo, and Romantic — fail us sometimes. He’s more like Giambattista Tiepolo, who is Venetian and Rococo and a capricci painter. In his implicit take on crazy, sinister monks, he anticipates Enlightenment-era reform movements. He anticipates Goya, too. Bober makes a good argument that he belongs in the show, though I’m not convinced. In Superbarocco, the Scuderie has a great exhibition. I learned so much.