Ligurian Painting

Luigi Speranza

Liguria, the Italian coast-line from La Mortola to Sarzana which includes Genoa -- the maritime rival of Venice. The domination of that Ligurian coast by the Genoese republic did not favour a local development of painting.

Foreign masters, German and Catalan, were employed in the Early Renaissance in much the same way that Rubens and Van Dyke were called there in the 17th century, and many secondary painters of Piedmont and Lombardy were also called.

There is indeed little of original initiative in the school.

The native 15th-century masters are quite mediocre as compared to the foreign masters who came, as Justus of Ravensburg and Conrad of Germany.

Among the painters of Nice, at that time an Italian city, the Brea family is the most important, and Ludovico Brea, trained in the Milanese school, collaborated with Vincenzo Foppa at Savona in the Triptych of 1490.

The true school of Genoa is Baroque, and

developed under the expansive influence of

the Jesuit style of church and

palace architecture.



Two or three men are of more than local fame, as

Luca Cambiaso, a decorator of grandiose facility

influenced by the Venetians,

Il Grecchietto, a naturalistic painter of

considerable originality, and

G. B. Castiglione.

Besides these, numerous mannered painters were employed in the decoration of the grandiose Baroque palaces of the region, and several capable followers of Van Dyke indicate the tendency of the school to a final disintegration under alien influence.

The smaller centres of all North Italy indeed show rich products of the High Renaissance impulse through the 16th century.

These, however, mean little for historical development.

They are an aftermath of the great movements of Venice and Florence, and the study of them belongs rather to special than general art history.