Genoa and Vandyck

 According to Edward Hutton, Genoa had no school of painting of its own. It could only boast of foreign painters like Rubens and Anthony Vandyck who came there to work in the early seventeenth century. In particular, he believed that Vandyck's work was transformed and humanized by his experience in Italy. *

 

Anthony Vandyck: Self Portrait

The city of Genoa, herself without a school of painting, had welcomed Rubens not long before very gladly, nor had Vandyck any cause to complain of her ingratitude.  He appears to have set himself to paint in the style of Rubens, choosing similar subjects, at any rate, and thus to have won for himself… a reputation but little inferior to his master’s. Certainly at this time his work is very Flemish in character, and apparently it was not till he had been to Venice and Rome that the influence of Italy and the Italian masters may be really found in his work. A disciple of Titian almost from his youth, it is the work of that master which gradually emancipates him from Flemish barbarism, from a too serious occupation with detail, the over-emphasis on northern work, the mere boisterousness, without any real distinction, that often spoils Rubens for us, and yet is so easily excused and forgotten in the mere joy of life everywhere to be found in it. Well, with this shy and refined mind Italy is able to accomplish her mission; she humanizes him, gives him the Latin sensibility and clarity of mind, the Latin refinement too, so that we are ready to forget that he was Rubens’ countryman… 

 

Much of this enlightening effect that Italy has upon the northerner may be found in the work of Vandyck upon his return to Genoa, really a new thing in the world, as new as the poetry of Spenser had been, at any rate, and with much of his gravity and sweet melancholy or pensiveness, in those magnificent portraits of the Genoese nobility which time and fools have so sadly misused. And as though to confirm us in this thought of him, we may see, as it were, the story of his development during this journey to the south in the sketchbook in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire. Here, amid any number of sketches, thoughts as it were that Titian has suggested, or Giorgione evoked, we see the very dawn of all that we have come to consider as especially his own….

 

Gradually Vandyck, shy and of a quiet, serene spirit… led by the immeasurable glory of the Venetians slowly escapes from that “Flemish manner” to be master of himself; so that, after he has painted in the manner of Titian at Palermo, he returns to Genoa to begin that wonderful series of masterpieces we all know, in which he has immortalized the tragedy of a king, the sorrowful beauty, frail and lonely as a violet, of Henrietta Maria and the fate of the Princes of England. And though many of the pictures he painted in Genoa are dispersed, and many spoiled, some few remain to tell us of his passing. One, a Christ among the Pharisees, is in the Palazzo Bianco, not far from the Palazzo Rosso, on the opposite side of the Via Garibaldi. But here there is a fine Rubens too; a Gerard David… a good Ruysdael, with some characteristic Spanish pictures by Zurbaran, Ribera, and Murillo… it is characteristic of Genoa that our interest in this collection should be with the foreign work there.

 

Vandyck: Genoese Noblewoman
Palazzo Rosso

###

 

 * Note: Edward Hutton had a special liking for King Charles I, the English King executed in 1641, his wife Henrietta Maria, and their two sons who would go on to become King Charles II, and King James I.

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 33-35.