From the Superb to the Eternal City (and vice versa): artists traveling between the 16th and 18th centuries

SERIES: Travels and sojourns of artists in Rome
SPEAKER: Piero Maria Boccardo, art historian
DATE: Wednesday, Feb. 28, 6 p.m. 

If already the Genoese activity of Perino del Vaga - called from Rome to work in the Ligurian capital by Andrea Doria in 1528 - made a generation of local artists aware of the need for updating in the light of what Michelangelo and Raphael had done in the Urbe, at the beginning of the seventeenth century the Roman works of Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio made a sort of secular pilgrimage to the Eternal City almost an obligation for Genoese painters.
While there was no shortage of artists who took the reverse route (Orazio Gentileschi and Simon Vouet, for example, or the unknown Giovan Battista Primi), the paths of the Genoese on the banks of the Tiber were the most diverse: if Domenico Fiasella fifty years later proudly reiterated "that he had learned [to paint] in Rome" and Gioacchino Assereto, on the other hand, declared that he had "not found there those excellences that you imagined s'hadva," others such as Giovanni Andrea Carlone and the Parodi brothers worked there with great success for several years. 

Piero Boccardo graduated from Genoa and then furthered his studies at the Autonomous University of Madrid and the Musée du Louvre in Paris. In 1989 he earned a PhD in Milan with a thesis on Genoese collecting in the 17th and 18th centuries.
He directed the Strada Nuova Museums (Palazzo Rosso, Palazzo Bianco and the collections in Palazzo Tursi) for 20 years until he was appointed Superintendent of the Artistic Heritage of the City of Genoa in 2019, a position from which he resigned in December 2021. 

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