Joos van Cleve and Genoa: the portrait of Stefano Raggio
The entry of the ‘Portrait of Stefano Raggio’ by the Flemish master Joos van Cleve (Antwerp, 1485–1540/1541) into the Galleria Nazionale della Liguria at Palazzo Spinola di Pellicceria, following its purchase by private sale by the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, is one of the most important acquisitions conceived in recent years for the enrichment of the historical and artistic heritage of Liguria. The portrait is one of the most eloquent pictorial testimonies of the close economic and cultural relations that linked the city of Genoa with Flanders, especially between the second half of the fifteenth and the first decades of the sixteenth century. It was as a result of the establishment of these links, which proved deep and enduring, that Flemish artists and paintings, highly appreciated by wealthy local collectors, arrived in Liguria. The portrait of Stefano Raggio, an influential nobleman who filled the most varied posts in Genoese political life from 1500 on, can be placed in this variegated historical context. Although no archival evidence attests to it, it is possible that Raggio commissioned both the portrait now in the Galleria di Palazzo Spinola and the triptych of the ‘Adoration of the Magi between St. Stephen and St. Mary Magdalen’ — still preserved in the Genoese church of San Donato —, directly from van Cleve in the course of a period of residence in the flourishing mercantile city of Antwerp in the second decade of the sixteenth century.
Several other paintings by Joos van Cleve are known to have been shipped to Genoa. They include not only the two important altarpieces depicting the ‘Adoration of the Magi with St. Dominic and St. Luke’ (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie) — painted for Oberto de Lazario Cattaneo — and the ‘Pietà’ (Paris, Louvre), formerly in the destroyed church of Santa Maria della Pace where it adorned the chapel of Nicolò Bellagio, but also the magnificent ‘Madonna and Child’ in the Palazzo Bianco and the ‘Virgin in Prayer’ belonging to the collection of paintings donated by the marchesi Spinola in 1958 together with the family palace in Genoa in which the portrait of Raggio is now displayed.
