Genoese School

one of the local schools of painting in 17th-century Italy.

The Genoese school developed early in the 17th century under the influences of Italian painting of the second half of the 16th century and the Flemish painters P. P. Rubens and A. van Dyck, who were working in Genoa. The luscious and sensuous Flemish influence is discernible in the early genre pictures of B. Strozzi, the leading artist of the Genoese school of the older generation. The Genoese artists also painted portraits of aristocrats in the grand style, religious compositions, and decorative murals. The most original creation of the Genoese school was the pastoral genre, in which a great deal of attention was paid to the depiction of landscapes, household utensils, and animals. The leading masters of this style were G. B. Castiglione and his follower A. M. Vassallo, who worked in the middle of the 17th century. A contemporary of the latter was V. Castello, whose unusually free and dynamic manner of painting endows his compositions on religious subjects with excitedly romantic and at times sharply dramatic qualities. Castello’s characteristic “brushstroke and spot painting” became widespread in Genoa and other art centers of northern Italy.

A distinctive Genoese school of architecture developed in the mid-16th century; its flowering is related to the work of G. Alessi and his pupils (R. Lurago and others). The characteristic features of Genoese architecture had their most brilliant manifestation in the houses of the Genoese nobles, combining the solemn splendor of a city palace with the intimacy of a rural estate.