- GENOA, 19 DEC - The devotion that joins the virtuosity in the innocent purity of the God made man of the "sleeping baby Jesus with the symbols of the passion".
The influence of Caravaggio in the strong contrasts of light and the dark background on which the figures of the "San Lorenzo dispenses silver to the poor" stand out. Or again, the realism and naturalistic intensity of the pictorial gesture in "San Gerolamo in meditation", a true piece of skill by the most important Genoese painter of the seventeenth century. These are just some of the precious canvases signed by Bernardo Strozzi that can be admired in Genoa, only for two days, on 22 and 23 December, as part of the "Bernardo Strozzi at Palazzo Pallavicino" exhibition,set up by the Pallavicino Foundation in the halls of the Palazzo in Piazza delle Fontane Marose.
Created to present to the public the valuable works of the collection of Prince Domenico Antonio Pallavicino, the exhibition - curated by Vittorio Sgarbi, artistic director of the Pallavicino Foundation - offers, even if for a limited time, the opportunity to get to know an artist with a strong personality. , through some of his most intense paintings, because they belong to the period of maturity, that of the thirties of the seventeenth century. Called the Capuchin or the Genoese Priest (in 1597 he entered the order of the Capuchins), Strozzi was born in Genoa in 1581 (he died in Venice in 1644), he was trained under the influence of the Flemish Peter Paul Rubens and Anton Van Dyck, but also by Federico Barocci, present in Genoa, in 1596, with the "Crucifixion" for the Cathedral, and then by Lombard painters, primarily Caravaggio:in this context, he succeeded in establishing himself for his personal style and pictorial virtuosity, so much so that he enjoyed consensus and fame in his time and is now considered one of the most important artists of the Genoese Baroque.
As Sgarbi writes in the exhibition catalog, this exhibition represents "a celebration for Genoa", in memory and "in the name of an extraordinary painter who represents more than any other the great painting that descends from Caravaggio and Rubens". The exhibition therefore wants to tell the talent and the story of a unique artist who, in the height of maturity, has created authentic masterpieces: a path not to be missed, which winds through the splendid rooms of the Pallavicino Foundation through "dazzling, surprising, powerfully vital paintings. , as living organisms that, at times, manifest a great scenographic ability, as in the San Giuseppe explains dreams, and a realistic rendering of great efficacy, as in the face of San Gerolamo in meditation, or in the Portrait of a Venetian magistrate ",Sgarbi writes again. (HANDLE).