The Palace
In the heart of Genoa one of the most luminous testimonies of late Baroque painting is preserved: Palazzo Fieschi Negrone, an aristocratic residence that still fascinates today thanks to the surprising integrity of its frescoes.
Thanks to its extraordinary frescoes, still perfectly legible today, the residence is identified as one of the principal sites of Genoese late Baroque painting.
The palace remained in the possession of the Fieschi family until the eighteenth century, when Teresa married Giovanni Battista Negrone, who in 1704 commissioned the celebrated Domenico Piola to decorate the salons of the Myth of Aurora and Cephalus and of Apollo and Mercury among the Muses.
The Aurora and Cephalus hall, created to exalt the marriage between the two families, is of particular interest. Indeed, the darker-toned portion of the fresco running beneath the central ceiling medallion identifies the intervention carried out in 1846 by Giuseppe Isola. A painter of the Hall of the Great Council in the Doge’s Palace, Giuseppe was called here to repair that portion of the seventeenth-century fresco cut by the nineteenth-century setback of the façade.
It is to the Tuscan Sebastiano Galeotti, however, that the most fascinating frescoes of the entire palace are owed. Arriving in Genoa in 1729 to decorate the Church of Santa Maria Maddalena and later (1736) a salon of Palazzo Spinola—today the seat of the National Gallery of Liguria—Sebastiano was noticed by Ambrogio Negrone, senator of the Republic and son of Giovanni Battista.
Galeotti’s painting, characterised by a “full precision of drawing and intense strength of colour”, vividly animates the rooms with the Triumph of Public Happiness and the Triumph of the Noble Arts. The latter, enlivened by extremely precise and detailed allegorical figures along the lateral compartments, conceals two fascinating clues: in the left corner of the ceiling, in fact, stand Mathematics and Architecture, holding respectively a tablet engraved with “17–30” and the plan of a palace. The first reference provides the date in which Galeotti executed the frescoes—namely 1730—while the second recalls the plan present in Scamozzi’s treatise.
Palazzo Fieschi Negrone, therefore, today identifies itself as a treasure chest of authentic history and wonder.