Descrizione
Storia dell’arte n. 161
Nuova Serie 1 | 2024
Cecilia Paolini
Rubens, courtier of Vincenzo Gonzaga: clarifications about his stays in Genoa
The art literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly concerning Italian authors, remembers Genoa as one of the cities where Rubens stayed the longest during his eight Italian years. This assumption is not reflected in the archival documentation, so the passages of the Flemish painter in the Ligurian land are reconstructed through indirect information. Thanks to several documents found in the State Archive of Mantua, the circumstances of at least two possible Ligurian stays are clarified: the first one took place in 1605, during which Rubens was in contact with Maria Doria, mother of Brigida Spinola, to whom he dedicated the famous portrait (signed and dated 1606) preserved at the National Gallery in Washington; the second one concerns the likely journey undertaken to accompany Vincenzo I Gonzaga, of which the new archival documentation details the chronological context and the planned stages.
