The Prestige of the Foreign: Devotional painting in Genoa, 1450-1530

Abstract

“The Prestige of the Foreign: Devotional Painting in Genoa 1450–1530” examines visual art production in the Mediterranean port city of Genoa through period conceptions of foreignness and mobility. With a preponderance of non-Genoese artists working in the city and enrolled in the guild—combined with a rich and varied visual culture shaped by maritime trade networks and the dizzying speed of socio-political change in the city—the visual art produced in Genoa has resisted the traditional practice of categorizing early modern Italian art according to regional schools and styles. I explore how itinerant and immigrant artists dominated art making in the region and establish the means by which the foreignness of these artists was legally constituted, culturally perceived, and strategically mobilized within the Genoese artistic sphere.

This dissertation contributes to the latest developments in the field of early modern Italian art history by foregrounding new approaches to the study of foreignness and mobility. Recent years have witnessed a surge of scholarly efforts to explore how post-colonial and geopolitically oriented approaches to the study of artistic exchange might challenge the norm of categorizing artists according to native or foreign styles. And yet, few have explored the historical roots of these historiographical distinctions or given sustained consideration to the legal and socio-economic conditions that underwrote them. This study adopts a juridical lens to investigate the impact of foreign practitioners on painting production in Genoa, a multiethnic crossroads in which the overwhelming majority of artists-in-residence originated from outside of the city. By combining analyses of legal regulations with theoretically informed interpretations of individual works of art, this dissertation calls attention to the political, religious, and institutional pressures that regulated the professional lives of painters working in Genoa. A selection of painted altarpieces commissioned for the Observant Dominican church of Santa Maria di Castello is examined. These altarpieces articulate the critical quotidian realities of art making in an environment structured by the circulation of artists, iconographies, technologies, and materials and an assimilative model of artistic production.

Chapter One introduces the economic and social conditions in Genoa and provides an analysis of Raffaele Soprani’s fundamental text The Lives of the Genoese Painters, Sculptors, and Architects and of the Foreigners Who Worked in Genoa (1674), assessing the volume’s impact on the reception of Genoese art in subsequent decades. Chapter Two examines the statutes of the Guild of Painters and the Confraternity of Foreigners to clarify how “foreignness” operated as a professional determinant and its practical implications for craftsmen. Chapter Three introduces Santa Maria di Castello and the contributions of painters Giovanni Mazone and Ludovico Brea, who are understood as complementary examples of professional careers and modes of painting. The altarpieces examined in this chapter were executed by foreign artists working in a variety of assimilative visual modes and they index the ways in which Genoese painting was forged at the intersection of travel and trade networks and the importation and adaptation of material and visual culture from outside the city. Chapter Four examines Pier Francesco Sacchi’s 1523 Altarpiece of St. Antoninus. Here, the Pavian Sacchi mobilized emerging imported pictorial typologies, creating an imaginary of maritime mobility and religious and political unity across the Mediterranean. Specifically, I argue that the painting is a response to the ongoing conflicts between the eastern and western Mediterranean.