Palazzo Rosso

Two brothers, one architect and a single new street produced Palazzo Rosso, the Brignole-Sale house that Genoa's last heiress gave to the city in 1874 with its pictures still in place. Veronese, Guercino and seven Van Dycks now hang among seventeenth-century fresco cycles that carry the scars and the memory of wartime bombing.

Why it matters

Work began in 1671 and finished in 1677, from a design attributed to Pietro Antonio Corradi with the site directed by Matteo Lagomaggiore. The palace was a deliberate double act: one facade on the Strada Nuova serving two households, those of the brothers Ridolfo and Gio.Francesco Brignole-Sale, each with its own noble floor arranged around loggias and a courtyard in the U-shaped plan the city's great builders had made fashionable. When Ridolfo died in 1683 without male heirs, the family story continued through the other line, and the house stayed with the Brignole-Sale for two centuries.

The gift that changed its status came in January 1874, when Maria Brignole-Sale, Duchess of Galliera and daughter of Antonio, donated the palace to Genoa, in the museum's own words to increase the city's dignity and usefulness and to raise a monument to her family. The donation preserved the palace as both a residence and a gallery.

What to notice

Two fresco campaigns shape the interiors. Between 1679 and 1694 Domenico Piola, Gregorio De Ferrari and Paolo Gerolamo Piola covered the first suite of rooms, with Bolognese quadratura by Gio.Enrico and Antonio Haffner in the great salon; the loggia became a gallery of painted ruins by Codazzi and a Diana and Endimione by Paolo Gerolamo Piola. From 1691 a second phase gave the west rooms to Gio.Andrea Carlone, who painted the cycles of the Life of Man and the Liberal Arts against landscapes by Carlo Antonio Tavella, and to Bartolomeo Guidobono, whose lost Forge of Vulcan was replaced in 1736 by Domenico Parodi's Gioventu in cimento.

The collection also includes: Veronese's Judith, Guercino's Cleopatra, Guido Reni's Saint Sebastian and a nucleus of seven Van Dycks, including portraits of the family — Paolina Adorno Brignole-Sale and the equestrian Anton Giulio. Outside, the facade owes its current face to Gio.Francesco II, elected doge in 1746, who commissioned Francesco Cantone to add the leonine protomes playing on the family arms, a lion beneath a plum tree. The Rigaud portraits recall his Paris diplomatic mission of 1737-1739.

Context and history

The palace absorbed every turn of its owners' fortunes. Around 1783 an apartment in the upper mezzanines welcomed the marriage of Anton Giulio II to Anna Pieri; much of it was later destroyed by bombing. In the Second World War aerial attacks cost the building its greatest vault fresco, the ceiling painting by Gregorio De Ferrari in the main salon, a loss the museum keeps visible in its narrative. The postwar decades added one curious survival: the apartment of an art lover fitted out in 1953-1955 on the top floor of the dependencies, which the museum today presents as an attraction in its own right. In 2006 the house entered the UNESCO site of Genoa's Strade Nuove and Rolli palaces as part of the via Garibaldi group.