The Musei di Strada Nuova present the exhibition Giulio Cesare Procaccini. The Reunited Apostles, which takes place at Palazzo Rosso in Genoa.

The exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of Galleria Goldfinch Fine Arts in Genoa and exceptionally reunites, after more than three hundred and fifty years, the six surviving canvases from the Apostles series commissioned to Giulio Cesare Procaccini (1574-1625), an Emilian painter naturalized in Milan, by the Genoese patrician Giovan Carlo Doria (1576-1625), his most important patron.

The exhibition is curated by Raffaella Besta, Head of the Polo Musei d’Arte Antica of the Municipality of Genoa, by Odette D’Albo, co-author with Hugh Brigstocke of the monograph on the painter published in 2020, and by Marco Franzone, an art historian to whom the rediscovery of the paintings with Saint Peter and Saint Bartholomew is attributed, now preserved in two different private collections.

The exhibition offers the opportunity to delve into the extraordinary relationship between Procaccini, a master capable of combining the grace of Correggio and Parmigianino with the exuberant energy of Rubens, and Giovan Carlo Doria, a man of immense wealth and one of the most refined collectors of early seventeenth-century Genoa. In his palace in vico del Gelsomino (now vico Monte di Pietà), no longer existing, Doria brought together over sixty works by Procaccini, contributing to making him one of the most influential artists of seventeenth-century Genoese painting, from Bernardo Strozzi to Domenico Piola.

According to sources, in 1618 Procaccini stays in Genoa with the collector, presumably to carry out his prestigious commission: the sensational "Last Supper" for the church of the Santissima Annunziata al Vastato. Shortly after, by 1621, Giovan Carlo Doria entrusts him with a grand cycle of canvases depicting the twelve Apostles, completed by the effigies of Christ and the Virgin. The idea seems to draw inspiration from the famous cycle by Rubens for the Duke of Lerma (1610-1612, now in the Prado Museum). After the death of the collector and his only son, the collections are divided among the heirs and with them the Apostles, remembered together for the last time in 1674. Following the dispersion, some canvases are lost or untraceable, while four - Saint Simon (or Saint Jude Thaddeus), Saint Paul, Saint Matthew, and Saint Thomas - arrive at Palazzo Rosso in 1874.