From Petrarch to John Evelyn and Richard Lassels in the seventeenth century, Genova La Superba is described as a great theater, enclosed by mountains and open to the sea, gateway to Italy and the Mediterranean. This is the stage for Superb Baroque, the magnificent catalogue for this once-in-a-lifetime show, five years in the making, delayed in 2020 and canceled due to the pandemic weeks before its scheduled opening in September 2021. Curated by Jonathan Bober at the National Gallery and Piero Boccardo and Franco Boggero at the Palazzo Rosso and Soprintendenza in Genoa, the show is now on view at its second and final venue at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome, 26 March–3 July, 2022. One can only hope that it will be resurrected in the future at the National Gallery or another US venue for a proper introduction to the art of this città sconosciuta so praised by Grand Tour travelers.

This is Baroque theater par excellence and a historic overview of Genoese art from Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyck to Alessandro Magnasco. The catalogue opens with introductory essays by Bober, Boccardo, and Boggero, setting the stage for A Superb Baroque in the larger context of the many native and foreign artists who worked in this city—an international crossroads, not a provincial center. Genoese economic historian Andrea Zanini outlines the history of the Genoese aristocratic republic of admiral Andrea Doria in 1528, and its reform. The reform allowed more new nobles into the lists of Genoese nobility in 1576, in alliance with Spain as financiers of the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire of Charles V and Philip II in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the New World. Genoese splendor and luxury display came from this pivotal connection to the silk and spice routes of the East and the new colonial trade routes of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans—a global repositioning of the city as rival to Venice.

Rubens's and Van Dyck's self-fashioning of Genoese nobles (“much affected to the Spanish mode and stately garb,” John Evelyn, Diary, 1.88) in classical scenic settings of their palaces on the Strada Nuova and Via Balbi, and their patronage of many Baroque churches and suburban villas along the Ligurian coastline, rivaled the ancient Roman Bay of Naples. Giovan Carlo Doria becomes a key figure here in his rearing equestrian portrait as member of the crusading Order of Santiago of Philip III, and in his Genoese palace near the Doria family piazza of San Matteo, which hosted Genoese artist Giovanni Battista Paggi's Accademia del Disegno, a group that broke the hold of guilds and proclaimed the independence of the artist, as discussed by CASVA expert Peter Lukehart. The accompanying catalogue of 140 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and lavish ceremonial silver plates is organized thematically and chronologically as a historical overview of the formation of the Baroque, with Bernardo Strozzi and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione through its heights in Domenico Piola and Gregorio De Ferrari, to the mystical visions of Magnasco in the Enlightenment and the formation of the Accademia Ligustica in 1751.

A central theme that might be emphasized more is the Savoy War with Turin of 1626, and the building of Genoa's great new wall system (1626–36) to the heights of the surrounding mountains, as well as the Genoese republic's election of the Virgin Mary as queen of Genoa in 1637, claiming equal royal status to other principalities and monarchies of Europe and beyond. If there is an official style of the Genoese republic, it is in the Roman triumphal entry tradition of the Augustan republic of Andrea Doria and the royal republic of biennial doge Agostino Pallavicino and successors after 1637. The style may be seen in this great città reale crowned by walls, with the Palazzo Ducale renamed Palazzo Reale, and it was performed in the Ceremonial Books of the Genoese Republic from 1561 to the end of the republic with Napoleon's occupation in 1797. It is this Genoa that Evelyn saw in 1644 and on horseback ascended the heights of the great new walls, a “Herculean” wonder (Evelyn, Diary, 1.87) from which he could clearly see Corsica, part of the new regno of Genoa, from medieval La Superba to Superb Baroque.