(Genoa 1609–1664 Mantua)
Animals entering Noah’s Ark,
oil on canvas, 170 x 131 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private European collection

Literature:
A. Orlando, Dipinti genovesi. Dal Cinquecento al Settecento. Ritrovamenti dal collezionismo privato, Turin 2010, p. 87 (as Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, il Grechetto)

The present painting dates to Grechetto’s maturity, to between the late 1650s and beginning of the 1660s, when the artist’s brushwork became extremely delicate and free, and his palette acquired a particular brilliance and intensity.

Here the artist reworks the composition of an early etching which may be dated to his first Roman sojourn, where the scene is developed vertically, and Noah is represented in the process of inviting the animals aboard the Ark. In addition, there are two variants of the scene of horizontal format, one in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden and the other in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, wherein the figure of Noah is rendered with few differences, while the arrangement of the animals is altered. These two works have also been assigned by scholars to the later production of Castiglione, around 1650.

Grechetto represented the subject of Noah’s Ark on several occasions, starting in his formative years in the studio of Sinibaldo Scorza, an artist specialised in animal and landscape painting. The influence of various Northern painters active in Genoa was also a determining factor in the development of his naturalistic style of painting, including the de Wael brothers, Frans Snyders and Jan Roos. However, the artist’s canvases are distinguished by his near humanisation of the animals he represents, a quality that is also evident in his graphic works: as a draughtsman and as a printmaker he was both very active and innovative. In the present canvas the vitality of each individual animal is united with the overall dynamism of the scene, which is set on a steep vertical plane, upon which Noah appears to be slipping forward, a quality typical of Castiglione’s mature Baroque paintings.

Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione was born in Genoa in 1609; in the 1620s he trained in the studio of Sinibaldo Scorza, as well as under the guidance of Giovanni Battista Paggi and Andrea de Ferrari, in a cultural climate influenced by the Genoese sojourns of Rubens and Van Dyck.

From 1632 he is documented with his brother Salvatore in Rome where within a brief time he was elected a member of the Accademia di San Luca. His exposure to Rome’s cultured circles, the influence of Nicolas Poussin’s painting and of his personal manner of evoking the classical world, as well as his subsequent contact with the Neapolitan art world, and especially with Aniello Falcone and Andrea De Leone, were to be determining and transformative factors in Castiglione’s assimilation of the Baroque style. Subsequently he resided in Rome for a second time between 1647 and 1651.

At the start of the 1650s Grechetto was summoned to the court of the Gonzaga where he worked for over a decade, also acting as an agent in the acquisition of paintings for the ducal collections. He died in Mantua in 1664.