“You will see a royal city, leaning against an alpine hill, superb for men and for walls, whose appearance alone indicates the lady of the sea” (Francesco Petrarca)

The exhibition “Superbarocco. Art in Genoa from Rubens to Magnasco “co-produced and designed together with the National Gallery of Washington, the only American public museum, with the special collaboration of the Municipality and the Museums of Genoa, tells and celebrates the extraordinary period of the Genoese Baroque.

The exhibition is curated by Jonathan Bober, head of the Department of Old Master Prints at the National Gallery in Washington, by Piero Boccardo, former director of the Genoese Palazzo Rosso and one of the world’s leading experts on the subject, and by Franco Boggero, art historian and expert of Ligurian painting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries The exhibition itinerary traces, through a body of about 120 works, coming from the major Italian and American institutions and from prestigious private collections, this extraordinary period of artistic explosion and economic flourishing of the Superb Genoa and follows its historical and artistic events from the height of the splendor until its political fortune tarnished.

The pomp and luxury, declined with great determination by the noble Genoese families, inside their residences, are found in the works exhibited at the Quirinale Stables, precisely because they were commissioned by these illustrious clients: the robes of the portraits of Rubens and Van Dyck , the furnishings that crowd the canvases of Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, the luxuriant baroque compositions by Domenico Piola and Gregorio De Ferrari, the capricious landscapes of Magnasco, the recurrent use of precious materials such as Carrara marble, the precious silver and amethyst, testify to the opulence of the period.