The canvas, referring to the period of the painter's stay in Genoa, can be dated around 1625 and reveals a profound influence of Venetian painting and, in particular, of Titian both as regards the pictorial technique and the colors and as regards the formal structure. The work is in fact a reinterpretation by Van Dyck of a composition of a similar subject painted by the Cadore painter for Philip II of Spain, now preserved in the National Gallery in London and, probably, known from the Flemish through an engraving by Martino Rota. This latter fact explains the reason why the depiction of Titian is here taken in counterpart, on the basis of the overturned engraving image. The narrated episode, taken from the synoptic Gospels, refers to the artificiosamin controversy in which the Pharisees and Herodians try to involve Jesus in taking a position on the controversial dispute over taxes and, more generally, on the question of recognizing the political authority of Rome. The Pharisees, bitter enemies of Roman power in Palestine, ask Christ whether or not it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, he replies that he is shown a coin and asks whose image and inscription on it is; the "opponents" reply that the image and inscription are of Caesar, the image was in fact that of the emperor Tiberius. Jesus, pointing to the effigy on the coin, says "Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God", thus implicitly inviting the Pharisees to distinguish between civil authority and religion. The painting, which was already in the Brignole - Sale a Palazzo Rosso collection from 1748 onwards, came to the Municipality of Genoa as a legacy of Maria Brignole - Sale De Ferrari, Duchess of Galliera, in 1889.

The portrait of Anton Giulio Brignole-Sale and that of his wife Paolina Adorno constitute one of the rare examples of en pendant portraits made by Van Dyck still remaining together. With a third painting, depicting Geronima Sale-Brignole with his daughter Aurelia, his mother and sister respectively, they were paid to the painter in 1627 - the final year of his stay in Genoa - for a total of 747 lire. These are probably the last paintings executed by the Flemish in Genoa, the city where he arrived in 1621 as "best disciple" of Rubens, soon enjoying extraordinary success among the new city nobility who, well aware of the symbolic value of the images and the celebratory message from they conveyed, he competed to be portrayed by the young artist. Anton Giulio Brignole - Sale, inheriting from his maternal grandfather the fief of Groppoli and the related title of marquis, was officially ascribed to the Genoese aristocracy in 1626; the following year, just twenty-two, he was portrayed by Van Dyck on horseback and in a stately pose, until a few years earlier reserved exclusively for sovereigns, which emphatically celebrates his recent social status. The compositional model of this equestrian portrait depends on famous Rubensian examples such as Gio. Carlo Doria (Genoa, Galleria di Palazzo Spinola) and the Duke of Lerma (Madrid, Prado Museum) but the pictorial material with which it is made is quite different from the rich and mellow one of the famous master. The canvas of Palazzo Rosso, in fact, is built with a very rapid execution technique, played by glazing of whites and varnishes but not of "body" colors, which ensures a great effect of matter without there being any real substance, such as typical of the works of the Flemish between 1626 and 1627.

This painting, in which Cleopatra is caught in the extreme moment of being bitten by an asp, in order not to suffer the shame of defeat and imprisonment, was painted by the master in the last phase of his activity, when, after moving to Bologna after the death of Guido Reni (1642), he inherited the role of head of the school and was influenced by it, orienting himself towards a classicist style painting, aimed at a greater idealization of the figures which is accompanied by a progressive reduction of the chromatic range and the frequent use of pastel colors. The canvas fits in well with this renewed stylistic direction, skilfully playing on the tones of only two colors: white for the sheets and for Cleopatra's complexion and purple for the cushions, the curtains of the alcove, arranged in a curtain, as in a theatrical performance, and the ruby-colored drops of blood that gush from the queen's breast, who, now bloodless, is languidly lying on the blankets. The painting is identifiable with the one mentioned in Guercino's Book of Accounts as "Cleopatra's picture" paid for 125 ducats "on 24 March 1648 by the most illustrious Mons. Carlo Emanuele Durazzi", cousin of a Stefano Durazzo. As was the tradition for many Genoese cardinals, he held the office of cardinal legate in the Emilian territories, subject to the Papal State. This institutional continuity - if the legate was not Genoese, the vice-delegate probably was - explains the great fortune of seventeenth-century Emilian painting in the collections of the Ligurian city. In the mid-eighteenth century by the Durazzo family, through various inheritance passages, the painting finally passed into the collection of Gio. Francesco II Brignole - Sale, who placed it in the picture gallery on the second noble floor of Palazzo Rosso.

The painting, dated to 1620, is a work of the artist's early maturity, whose formation was influenced above all by the chromatic lesson of Titian, which constitutes the real premise to his painting of touch, with large liquid and luminous spots of color, and from the encounter with the art of the Carraccis, especially Ludovico. The relationship with the Bolognese painters, in particular, was essential for Guercino because it allowed him to broaden his horizons and to get in touch with the most up-to-date pictorial culture of the time, without however forgetting that genuine naturalistic vein that is the basis of his inspiration. . The painting is a precious example of the artist's style, characterized by a warm chromatic range and a strong "stained" chiaroscuro; very tender is the figure of the little angel, seen next to the majesty of the Eternal Father. The small canvas was commissioned from Guercino by Cristoforo Locatelli and was to be placed on the cymatium of the altarpiece depicting the dressing of Saint William of Aquitaine in the church of San Gregorio in Bologna. According to the Bolognese historian Carlo Cesare Malvasia, the client, struck by the extraordinary beauty of the painting, decided to keep it for himself, placing a copy in its place, which remained on site until 1962. The painting was part of a small group of works by great value of Palazzo Rosso that the Duchess of Galliera brought with her to the Parisian residence and therefore did not re-enter the donation of 1874, but became property of the Municipality of Genoa only after the death of the noblewoman by virtue of her bequest.

Certainly Strozzi's best-known painting, this canvas, known as The Cook, rather portrays a scullery maid plucking a goose among chickens and pigeons, with a turkey hanging behind her, in the kitchen of a seventeenth-century Genoese aristocratic residence. Among the families of the local nobility, the profession of cook was reserved exclusively for men at the time, while women could only take care of humbler tasks, such as plucking poultry; that it is an aristocratic residence, on the other hand, it is certain, given the presence in the foreground of a rich embossed silver tin plate, with an elaborate handle depicting a female figure. The painting is mentioned for the first time in the inventory of 1683-1684 by Gio. Francesco I Brignole - Sale, client of the Palazzo Rosso residence; from the second decade of the eighteenth century, however, and at least until 1774, the work is always remembered in the family villa on the Albaro hill: it is very likely that this less prestigious location was motivated by the immediate everyday subject of the painting, judged probably not suited to the decoration of the city palace, whose picture gallery had been enriched, between the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, with canvases of historical subjects or sacred iconography. Strozzi's work is an admirable synthesis of the various influences that in the early decades of the seventeenth century constituted the fabric of local painting: on the one hand the Flemish fashion for the representations of "kitchens", "markets", "pantries", which he had found examples, already in the mid-sixteenth century, in paintings by painters such as Aertsen and Beuckelaer, present in the Genoese collections; on the other hand, the new focus on the genre of "still life", due to the presence in the city of painters, still from Flanders, such as Jan Roos or Giacomo Liegi; lastly, the first affirmation of that naturalism of Caravaggesque origin that constituted the other pole of updating of the local school, which is joined by the typical brushstroke of the painter. From an iconographic point of view, the desire to compete with the representation of popular subjects is clear, showing an adherence to reality still unknown to Genoese painters, and singular when considering this choice by a religious; it is not excluded, however, that beyond this immediate meaning other symbolic contents may be hidden in the painting, perhaps - as has been proposed - an allegory of the four elements, to which the birds would allude, for the air, the elaborate stagnara , for the water, the "cook", for the earth, and the fire, which the painter paints with great skill in its crackling under the cauldron.

Reni, so famous in his day that he was appealed only by his first name, Guido, often preceded by the overly praiseworthy adjective "divine", after a training in his homeland, starting from the age of twenty-five he had frequent and long stays in Rome, where he was greatly appreciated by the pope's family and by other members of the papal court. Also this canvas, where Saint Sebastian is represented, who according to tradition was a Roman soldier originally from Gaul martyred at the time of Diocletian, must be the result of that kind of commission, since in addition to the high pictorial quality, recent analyzes have shown that it adds a precious realization, given that lapis lazuli was widely used for the blue of the sky, so expensive that it is generally supplied or paid for separately by the client. The image, responding to the classic ideals of Reni's poetics, does not show the body of a martyr scarred by darts and run over by streams of blood, but the idealized one of a young man with a decidedly sensual beauty. Dating from around 1615, the canvas had great success, so much so that Cardinal Borghese wanted a similar version, the result at least in a large part of the artist's workshop, and now preserved in the Capitoline Picture Gallery. Reni must subsequently have returned to this subject, re-proposing it with different variations: replicas of this other type are known in various museums around the world (Louvre, Prado, Dulwich Picture Gallery), but none reaches the quality of this one, which ended up in the Brignole collection - It rises already before the end of the seventeenth century.

The painting is one of the masterpieces of Palma il Vecchio, an exponent of Venetian art of the early sixteenth century. The artist was trained in Venice at the Giovanni Bellini school and, later, was influenced by the stylistic demands of Giorgione and Tiziano. In this "Sacra Conversazione" datable to around 1520-1522, the half-length figures are perfectly inserted in the luminous landscape of the background, pervaded by a clear and diffused light typical of Venetian painting between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The symmetry with which the characters on the sides of the Virgin are arranged is a clear reference to Bellini, but the sumptuousness of the undulating drapery, as well as the solemnity of the attitudes of the Magdalene and the Baptist and the well-articulated and unconstrained space, reveal an autonomous maturity of the painter's style in a fully Renaissance sense. To underline the splendid color scheme of the work, in which the ultramarine blue of the Virgin's mantle prevails over the blue with gray iridescence of Mary Magdalene's dress, in turn in harmonious counterpoint with the gray tunic and olive green mantle of the Baptist. The tender gazes of the women, the soft curls of the Baptist's hair, the accuracy of details such as the burgundy velvet sleeve of the Magdalene's right arm, the excellent quality of the texture across the entire surface of the painting, these and other aspects make of this work an excellent example of the painting of Palma.

The room owes its name to the subjects that Lorenzo De Ferrari (1680-1744), the son of the more famous Gregory painted there, in fresco on the wall and in tempera on canvas, in the last years of his activity and commissioned by Gio. Francesco giuniore Brignole - Sale (1695-1760), who had wanted to make his study of this room. Regardless of the local tradition, De Ferrari did not transfigure the space to set allusive mythologies, as in the other rooms of the palace, but celebrated the theme "Virtù Patrie" through a series of images, taken from Roman antiquity, variously arranged within a decoration particularly appreciable in its overall effect. At the center of the vault the personification of Value is depicted which, placed in relation to the Virtues to which the cherubs and symbols in the background allude, configures it as an allegorical emblem of the "Patrie Virtues", that is, of the moral attitudes considered fundamental for the governance of the thing. public. In the corners are painted small scenes illustrating episodes from ancient Roman history - Scipio's Allocution in the Senate, The Vestals guard the sacred fire, The matrons offer their jewels to the homeland, The military triumph of Constantine - which must be read as examples the exercise of virtues towards the fatherland. On the walls other personifications of Virtue - clockwise, from the west: Intelligence (?), Council, Fidelity, Concord, Relief and Public Happiness - take up the concepts already expressed on the vault, alongside the large squares that house four canvases, painted in tempera , which still illustrate exemplary subjects of Roman history: The justice of Tito Manlio Torquato in condemning his son, The continence of Publio Cornelio Scipione in returning his fiancée to Allucio, The fortress of Muzio Scevola in punishing himself for failing to kill Porsenna and La religiosity of Numa Pompilius.

Domenico Piola painted the vaults of the last two eastern rooms of the second noble floor of Palazzo Rosso between 1687 and 1688, as attested by the balances of payments concerning him. It is the period following his return from the trip-escape undertaken in 1684, following the French bombing of the city, which took him to various locations in Northern Italy and especially to Parma, where he was able to compare and update his way to conceive the painted space in relation to the architectural one. This experience, and, at the same time, the contact with Gregorio De Ferrari, his son-in-law and pupil, gave his language a looser lightness, especially in the practice of a lighter and less full-bodied use of color, which is associated with a taste for space. open and for the composition intended in a rotating sense. They are recognizable elements in the conception of the rooms with the allegories of Autumn and Winter, where Domenico made use of the collaboration of the plasterer Giacomo Muttone and the Bolognese quadraturist Stefano Monchi. The Autumn theme is resolved with the traditional representation of the triumph of Bacchus. The vault depicts, immersed in a clear diffused light, the god not intent, however, in wild celebrations, but rather young, beardless, caught in a moment of calm tenderness when, having arrived on the island of Naxos, he met Ariadne, abandoned there by Theseus , he fell in love with her and wanted her as his bride. The result is a painting in which the drawing as a structuring element of the image gives way to color which, through light transitions, shapes the bodies and spatial planes. The Bacchic Thiasus, animated and lively, is relegated to the margins of the composition: drunken Silenus, bacchantes, centaurs, satyrs and the animals dear to Dionysus - goats, panthers, monkeys - master lunettes and corbels with more vivid and plastic chromatic registers, in pleasant , dialoguing contrast with the vault. The beautiful gilded stucco frieze that runs along the four sides of the room, in a continuous succession of vine shoots, in addition to reaffirming the theme of the season, gives the inspiration for the decorative motif of the frame of the large mirror placed between the windows.

The depiction of Apollo, caught in his palace as he prepares to drive the golden "chariot of the sun", is a very frequent iconographic motif in the decoration of noble residences between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The literary source consists of Ovid's Metamorphoses and the allusion to identifying the shining god with the commissioner of the work as well as the Palazzo del Sole with the patrician residence well suited to the needs of decorum and self-celebration so dear to the ruling class of the "century of gold ". The theme is addressed by Piola in a rather literal transposition of Ovid's text. In the palace of Apollo, in addition to Chronos, the Months, Days, Hours resolved in the painting live as transparent figures, in contrast with the Baroque redundancy of the composition. The protagonist of the pace of Time are, however, the Seasons, which gather around Apollo, rendered with a compositional and chromatic happiness that alternates dark tones for the colder seasons to the bright ones for those of the prosperity of the year. Spring opens the way to the chariot, crowned with flowers, caught in the act of scattering petals, also identifiable with Aurora who, according to tradition, precedes the chariot of the sun. Radiated with intense light, the figure of this young woman forms the trait d’union with the lower part of the painting, where Autumn and Winter find their place. The exhibition is closed by Summer, a young woman holding the fruits of her season in her hand, flanked by a putto with a bundle of ears. True incipit of the cycle of frescoes in Palazzo Rosso by Piola himself and Gregorio De Ferrari, of which he anticipates the themes, this painting was not, however, executed to be placed in its current location and was made much earlier, in the forties, when the collaboration with his brother-in-law Stefano Camogli was assiduous, to whom the floral parts were entrusted, which also in this painting are completely attributable to him. Purchased by Ridolfo Brignole - Sale in 1679 to place it in the hall, it was on that occasion enlarged by Piola himself.

Moving to Bruges from the northern Netherlands in 1484, at the end of the 15th century Gerard David inherited the role of undisputed protagonist of the local pictorial scene from Memling, painting both monumental works for the most important religious and secular institutions and private portraits and devotional paintings sold. partly on the free market. At least seven different versions depicting the Madonna della pappa can be traced back to this last genre - among which the panel kept at the Aurora Trust in New York, considered the oldest and highest pictorial quality example -, which share the same cardboard or model, substantially recognizable in all replicas, made with greater or lesser participation of the workshop. In the composition, datable to 1510-1515, influences of Lombard imprint have been recognized, probably derived from examples of the Madonna and Child dating back to a Leonardo prototype of which there are several variants made by Italian and Nordic artists, from Bernardino de 'Conti to the Lombard Ambrogio Benzone or Ambrosius Benson, who in 1519 entered David's workshop in Bruges. In the interpretation of this subject, set in a domestic and intimate interior, the Flemish components of the representation seem to prevail both in the landscape that opens on the horizon and in the minute description of the objects in the foreground: the bread, the bowl with the milk, the knife and the apple which seem to allude respectively to a precise message of Eucharistic content; in this way everyday things also acquire a different meaning and the bread and milk of the baby food become a symbol of the Eucharist of Christ while the knife prefigures his Passion.

The painting is part of a series of twelve canvases by the Flemish painter Jan Wildens that illustrate the months of the year in relation to the various human, agricultural, work and leisure activities that characterize the different seasons. The entire cycle, documented for the first time in Palazzo Rosso at the end of the eighteenth century, when it was still attributed to GotfriedWaals, during the nineteenth century was divided into the various Brignole residences - Sale and then came to the civic collections - twice and incomplete - by means of the donation and the legacy of the Duchess of Galliera: May, June, July, August and September were in fact destined for Palazzo Rosso, while January, April and November for Palazzo Bianco. Gathered in a single exhibition venue, the months of March and October are missing to complete the original series, remaining in the ancient villa Brignole - Sale of the Genoese suburb of Albaro, now home to a religious congregation, December, identified in a collection canvas private, and February, currently missing. The subject, typical of the Flemish iconographic tradition, was widespread in Genoa where, most likely, Wildens himself stayed during his Italian stay, which lasted from 1613 to 1616; the cycle is dated to 1614, in consideration of the fact that at least three of the canvases in this series bear this date. The scene dedicated to the month of January is set in a vast snow-covered plain, crossed by a frozen river that occupies the right side of the painting; the left is instead animated by a group of houses and a church. The typically Flemish landscape is crowded with many people engaged in different activities: skaters whipped by the wind, children with sleds or throwing snowballs, women who bring home the freshly bought bread, all portrayed with extreme realism, attentive to more anecdotal details and, at times, facetious of the story.

Maria Brignole - Sale, known in Genoa as the "Duchess of Galliera", was one of the most generous characters in the city. Last descendant of the noble family of Brignole - Sale, she spent most of her life in Paris, where her husband, Raffaele De Ferrari, one of the most skilled, fortunate and richest financial men of his time, carried out his business. After her death, being in possession of an immense patrimony and having no de facto heirs, since the only son who survived her, the second son Filippo, gave up the family inheritance, the Duchess dedicated herself to great charitable works by founding kindergartens, hospitals (the Galliera hospital is still the second in Genoa today) and orphanages both in France and in Genoa. In 1874 he made a gift to the Municipality of Genoa of Palazzo Rosso, the ancestral home of the Brignole - Sale, with the art collections it contained, a perennial testimony of the magnificence of the family; this act will be followed by the testamentary legacy (1889) of Palazzo Bianco and another large amount of paintings and sculptures, which formed the fundamental nucleus of the Strada Nuova Museums. Léon Cogniet, one of the most sought-after portrait painters of the high society of the time, especially for his ability to evoke the intimate personality of the model, portrayed her in his prestigious Parisian home, the Hôtel Matignon, now the seat of the Presidency of the Council of the Republic French, while holding on her lap, resting on the Brignole Bible - an illuminated manuscript of the thirteenth century - her second son, Philip. Almost indifferent to him, Maria turns a melancholy gaze towards the marble bust that can be seen reflected in the mirror at the back of the wall; it depicts Andrea, the eldest son, who died at the age of fourteen, to whom the rose placed on the prie-dieu also alludes, as a sign of a tender flower, destined to perish.