The stucco work and frescoes

Between 1597 and 1599 Marcello Sparzo worked on the decoration of the Gallery and the nine rooms of the palace. The vault of the Gallery presents five “raised panels” (one was destroyed almost completely during the bombardment of 1944), subsequently embellished with frescoes. Around them is arranged rich stucco decoration , “a grottesche”, with allegorical figures, scenes drawn from the classics, heraldic symbols. The lunettes enclose ovals within lively moulded frames, surmounted in the spandrels above by analogously worked roundels.

Between the lunettes are standing figures, which are portrayed almost in the round: on the long sides of the Gallery are depicted Roman warriors, probably depicting the series of the “twelve Caesars”, widely diffused in the decoration of galleries. It may well be that there is here too that parallel between ancient personages and members of the Doria family, who in the Loggia of the Heroes are explicitly identifiable. The short west side is dominated by the figure of Andrea Doria crowned with laurel, with his foot on the head of a defeated enemy characterized as a Turk. Andrea wears on his breast the honour of the Golden Fleece granted him by Charles V in 1531, and is portrayed as clothed and in a pose deliberately identical to those of the “ancients” which decorate the other walls.

The decorative motifs of the area immediately above the figure are again celebrations of the personage: in fact, the allegory of Strength (a woman with a lion beside her and a thickened column) stands above him, and two scenes of battles between marine monsters, of classical inspiration, alluding to the role as lord of the waters filled by Doria as admiral of Charles V. On the opposite side, to the east, there was a younger figure without beard, today lost, identifiable as the Giovanni Andrea who commissioned the work, or as his father, Giannettino, who died prematurely in 1547.

The choice of themes represented in the Gallery are significant: in the stuccoes, in fact, two separate iconographical currents flow together, created originally to celebrate Andrea and then reused subsequently by his heir, in a deliberate continuation of the image. There is plenty of marine symbology (a tradition of mythological references which in the same period finds renewed and grandiose expression in the monumental Fountain of Neptune, commissioned by Giovanni Andrea from Taddeo Carlone and his brothers). However, the iconography of the condottiere or Roman emperor prevails, which Giovannangelo Montorsoli started with his marble statue of Andrea carried out at the orders of the Magistratura dei Dodici of the republic of Genoa and placed in the Palazzo Ducale (1540), a type which was taken up again at the beginning of the following century by Taddeo Carlone, who received the commission of sculpting the portrait of Giovanni Andrea.

Montorsoli’s statue, badly damaged during the revolutionary upheavals of June 1797, is in effect the direct model of the figure of Andrea realized by Sparzo, even in the detail of the Turk’s head (two in the sculpture of Montorsoli) pressed down by the foot of the personage, an allusion to the clashes of the admiral with the Turkish fleet and to his victories over the Barbary pirates.

The overall scheme of the decoration of the vault, long spoilt by an ochre-coloured wash dating to the beginning of the nineteenth century, was originally varied in tonality, as revealed by cleaning trials, with hues of green, brown and blue, this last particularly present in the ovals and roundels of the lunettes and spandrels, which, it would appear, originally had the aspect of “trompe-l’oeil perspectives” opened in the sky.

Gilding enriched the whole to the extent that the room earned the name of the golden gallery, which is the name Giovanni Andrea used to refer to it. Subsequently to the realization of the decorative structure, frescoes were painted between the “raised panels”: in the rectangle at the centre an Allegory of Fame, to the side of this panels with illusionary architecture, and then figures of putti within false marble balustrades. The greatest nineteenth-century Genoese connoisseur, Federico Alizeri, attributed the frescoes to Domenico Fiasella, but Fame, which is the most important part of them, has been convincingly associated by Newcome with a drawing by Giulio Benso (1592-1668), today in a private collection.

The taste for experimenting with perspective which is evident in the virtuoso “under the figures and the treatment of the drapery are typical of the style of this artist. In the absence of a more precise hypothesis on the dating during the span of Benso’s active life, it is not possible to establish which of the descendants of Giovanni Andrea completed the decoration with this decoration, which is consistent from the iconographic point of view with the plans for the glorification of the family which existed in the preexisting decoration. I think there’something missing in this passage.

According to a never finished project of Giovanni Andrea, the room should have been embellished with pictures portraying the feats of the most illustrious members of the Doria family, in particular Andrea. This programme, proven by two letters by ??? (Merli-Belgrano 1874) were to increase the message of autocelebration which was then entrusted to the figures of Sparzo alone.

It is evident, however, that the first function of the gallery was that of astate room and of dynastic exaltation, on analogy with the intentions of the prototype of the modern gallery, that of François I at Fontainebleau, the decoration of which, finished in 1540, mixed ancient history, mythology and the direct presence of the figure of the sovereign to exalt his glory. It is possible that, in addition to this purpose, there was the intention of gathering and displaying collections, in accordance with the ever more precise use that the word “gallery” was assuming in Italian at that time, following a fashion popular in Genova too (many ancient pieces were imported from Rome). Unfortunately we do not at present know what the decoration of the room was. The lined plaster of the walls, which are without decoration, was certainly supposed to be overlaid with some sort of facing.

The series of tapestries displayed here now are consistent with the dimensions of the gallery. This would seem to uphold the hypothesis that they constituted the original decoration, but the documents give us dates for the commission and execution of the tapestries which are several years earlier than the construction of this complex and a different destination within the palace. The problem of the decoration of the gallery therefore remains open.