VALERIO CASTELLO - (Genova, 1624 - ivi, 1659)

HOLY FAMILY WITH YOUNG ST. JOHN Oil on canvas – cm. 74.4 x 63.5 work by VALERIO CASTELLO (Genoa, 1624 – ibidem, 1659) EXTREMELY RARE WORK FROM A MAJOR INTERNATIONAL MUSEUM (see expertise of Prof. Jürgen Winkelmann) Biographical and stylistic notes on Valerio Castello, modern genius (by Prof. Giovanni Morsiani) Valerio Castello (Genoa, December 22, 1624 – Genoa, February 17, 1659) From a very young age, he broke with the Genoese pictorial tradition. His strong personality led him to distance himself from the naturalistic current in vogue in Genoa in the 1640s, and to make fully autonomous choices. Through a recovery of the masters of 16th-century Mannerism, an update sought elsewhere, in Parma and Milan, and careful observation of the works of Flemish and Venetian artists abundantly present in Genoese collections, he gave a new course to the Baroque season, giving that mid-century turning point in the name of a dynamic, joyful and musical painting. Within the Genoese figurative culture, no one like him knew how to interpret, through the liveliness of the compositional rhythm and the exuberant coloristic effervescence, the new feeling of an era in which dominant factors were the representation of the great Baroque space and persuasive theatricality. Despite the innovative scope of his art, Valerio Castello appeared as a solitary artist, inaccessible on the plane of strict emulation: but the destinies of Genoese painting remained so deeply influenced by his artistic experience that, following his meteoric appearance, nothing remained as before. Only the passage of several decades allowed the environment to metabolize such expressive audacity, favoring the affirmation of artists such as Gregorio de Ferrari and, at the close of the great century of Genoese painting, Alessandro Magnasco. 1624 Born in Genoa on December 22, son of the painter Bernardo Castello, who would die five years later. Valeriano - as recalled by the baptismal document kept at the parish archive of the church of San Martino d'Albaro - seems to have been largely educated by his older brother Torquato. 1634 - 1640 In the Vite de' Pittori, Scoltori et Architetti Genovesi (1674), the biographer Raffaele Soprani states that Valerio showed precocious aptitudes for painting, cultivated in solitude in comparison with the frescoes that Perin del Vaga, a student of Raphael, had left a century earlier in Genoa in the palace of Prince Doria in Fassolo. He was soon apprenticed to one of the most famous artists of the time, Domenico Fiasella (1589-1669), and then to Giovanni Andrea De Ferrari (1598-1669). Neither the father, who died prematurely, nor the supposed masters exerted any appreciable influence on his future stylistic path. 1640 - 1645 The early 1640s, those in which Valerio goes from sixteen to twenty years old, are of great ferment for the arts in the city in the name of naturalistic investigation and the accentuation of a poetics of affections due to artists such as Domenico Fiasella, Orazio De Ferrari, Giovanni Andrea De Ferrari, Luciano Borzone, Giovanni Battista Carlone. At the same time, the quadreries housed in the extraordinary palaces and churches were growing with a considerable number of "foreign" works from Milan, Emilia, Veneto, Rome, Flanders: for example, the extraordinary crucifixion by Federico Barocci in the cathedral of San Lorenzo, or the Last Supper by Giulio Cesare Procaccini in the church of the Santissima Annunziata, but above all the Van Dycks of private collections, painted between 1621 and 1627, and the two capital altarpieces by Rubens for the church of Gesù. These are the texts on which the young Valerio also studies and trains. It is probable, therefore, that the trips to Milan and Parma, which fell in this first half of the fifth decade of the century, and the consequent close study of the Milanese of the early seventeenth century (Procaccini, Morazzone and Cerano) and the great Emilian masters of the sixteenth century (Corrreggio and Parmigianino), allowed a deepening of stimuli already absorbed at home. 1647 Probably Valerio paints in this moment, for the cycle of the oratory of San Giacomo della Marina, the canvas with the Vocation of San Giacomo. In the second, depicting the Baptism of San Giacomo, for the same cycle, he applies a new conception of space of Veronese imprint. 1648 Valerio signs and dates the altarpiece of the church of San Siro in Santa Margherita Ligure depicting San Sebastiano between the saints Lorenzo and Rocco. 1649 The execution of the extraordinary and Rubensian Conversion of San Paolo, which can be visited at the National Gallery of Palazzo Spinola di Pellicceria and comes from the monastic church of San Paolo di Prè, probably falls in this year. The client was Giovanni Battista Balbi, who with this work, destined for the convent where some of his daughters nuns resided, seems to have tested the artist before entrusting him with the frescoes for his palace. In the same year he created for the chapel dedicated to San Francesco Saverio in the church of Gesù three canvases with facts of the saint's life. 1650, post The frescoes for the church of San Martino di Albaro date back to this time, where the Assumption of the Virgin is set up as an engaging Baroque machine of great impact. 1653 He paints, signing and dating them on the back, two small oils on copper, San Francesco receives the stigmata and Santa Chiara in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, registered in 1688 among the paintings owned by Filippo Spinola of Massimiliano, Count of Tassarolo. 1653-1654 By the spring of 1654, perhaps already starting from the last months of the previous year, Valerio works in the palace of Giovanni Battista Balbi (today Palazzo Reale), frescoing the vault of the Fama parlor, among the quadratures of Giovanni Maria Mariani from Ascoli, who stayed in the city, precisely, between September 1653 and the following May. Castello, right in the patrician residence, finds important stimuli: in the parlor next to the one in which he works, the fresco by Agostino Mitelli and Angelo Michele Colonna with the Allegrezza that drives away Time, painted just two years before his Fama, constitutes the ideal starting point. 1654-1656 From the second half of 1654 Valerio moves to work in another nearby Balbi palace. The painter is in fact engaged in the fresco decoration of numerous rooms on the second noble floor of the palace of Francesco Maria Balbi, cousin of Giovanni Battista (today Palazzo Balbi Senarega, seat of the University, via Balbi 4), this time next to Andrea Sighizzi, a Bolognese quadraturist documented in Genoa between June 1654 and January 1655. The frescoes follow one another along the walls of the different rooms: from the vault of the gallery-loggia overlooking the garden with the Rape of Proserpina and the Fall of Phaeton, to the Chariot of Time on the ceiling of the central hall, to the Leda room, to that of Peace with Allegrezza and Abundance. The plague, which broke out in the middle of 1656 with numerous victims among painters, architects and patrons, probably interrupted the works, then completed by Valerio in the last two years of his very short life. 1655 He paints, signing and dating it, the majestic altarpiece with Saints Mark the Evangelist, John the Baptist, Cecilia, Martino and Lorenzo for the parish church of Recco. He creates, in oil on slate, a Madonna with Child Jesus and Saint Luke, signed and dated above the plinth, probably intended to devotionally mark a small votive shrine. On December 17 of the same year he is paid for the execution of the Madonna with Child Jesus between Saints John the Baptist and George (Genoa, Musei di Strada Nuova - Palazzo Bianco), destined for the office of the Fathers of the Municipality in Palazzo Ducale. 1657 On Tuesday, June 26, Valerio, a few months before getting married, dictates a will to the notary Franco Bagnasco. The legacies are addressed exclusively to family members: to his mother, his brother Torquato and his sister Tecla Maddalena. On October 12, Valerio marries Paola Maria Deferrari in the parish church of San Martino di Albaro. The spouses will go to live in a house that Bernardo Castello owned in the city, precisely "in carubeo nuncupato delli Angeli or Testa dell'Oro parochie S. Marie Magdalene". End of 1657-1659 The remaining fresco works must be dated between the end of the plague and the beginning of 1659: the completion of the decorations, already started, in the palace of Francesco Maria Balbi, and, alongside Paolo Brozzi and Domenico Piola, the paintings on the vault of the church of Santa Marta; the frescoes on the facade of a house in Piazza San Genesio (lost); the works for Santa Maria in Passione, known only from some preparatory drawings and old photographs. 1658-1659 The documents relating to the construction of Giovanni Battista Nascio's casino, decorated by Castello with episodes taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses, between the quadratures of Paolo Brozzi and the co-presence of Domenico Piola, are dated to March 18 and October 30, 1658. Already in the eighteenth century these frescoes were no longer preserved. 1659 At the age of thirty-four, on February 17, he dies suddenly and in still unknown circumstances. He is buried in the family tomb in the church of San Martino d'Albaro. Domenico Piola, his favorite collaborator, will complete most of the remaining unfinished works. Prof. Giovanni Morsiani website: www.palazzodelbuonsignore.com 
Measures H x L x P cm. 74,4 x cm. 63,5 x