Described as “the greatest nocturne of the 16th century in Italy”, the painting, dating to around 1575, is an outstanding example of the “candlelit” style which became widespread in the second half of the 16th century. From the collection of Vincenzo Giustiniani in Rome, it is one of the most representative works of Cambiaso's later output, imbued with a light which heightens the deeply dramatic nature of the scene and seems to anticipate some of the most brilliant output of 17th-century Europe.

Painted for the brotherhood of St. Erasmus around 1536 and kept in the oratory of the same name in Quinto, the polyptych was bought by the Accademia in 1870. The polyptych structure is linked to the commissioning brotherhood, and depicts the figures of Saints Erasmus, Peter and Paul in hieratic frontal poses; by contrast, the lunette, whose figures appear to extend beyond the limits of the panel, successfully unites the composition. The figures are formed through vivid fields of colour applied in delicate glazes, producing a three-dimensional effect.

Since the end of the 19th century, Nativity scenes set up by the Capuchin fathers have regularly featured in Genoese guides and news, a sign of the monks’ special connection with this tradition.

Over the years, the Capuchin Culturale Heritage Museum stores have gathered numerous nativity figurines from various Capuchin convents throughout the region. Over ten years ago a programme for the recovery and restoration of these prized artefacts was begun, with one of the most outstanding examples being the group of clothed mannequins from the Capuchin convent of Sarzana.

Of great artistic value is the majestic procession of the Magi attributed to the workshop of Anton Maria Maragliano (Genoa, 1664 - 1739). The celebrated sculptor, who is not recorded with any certainty as having made clothed mannequins, would make use of his pupils for their production, providing models as basis for their creation, while reserving for himself the production of processional statues and sculptures or much larger wooden groups.

The figurines by Pasquale Navone (Genoa, 1746 - 1791), one of the most illustrious followers of Maragliano’s work, are of particular value: his shepherds, peasants and commoners are recognisable due to their greater size compared to the other statues in the group, as well as the details and refinement of their features and skin tones.

The figure of the beggar, typical of Genoese Nativity scenes, deserves a special mention, standing out as it does in striking contrast to the splendour of the magnificent procession of the Magi. The figure is dressed in denim, the fabric used for jeans, whose etymology derives from the word Gênes: Genoa. The famous American fabric is none other than a direct descendent of the "bleu de Gênes", the cotton cloth produced and dyed in Genoa and used for the cargo of the ships setting sail for the New World.

The Nativity scene's long history begins in the ‘30s, and it is recorded that in 1947 it was put on display by its maker Franco Curti in his home town of Carmagnola. Over the years the Nativity began to gain fame throughout Piedmont and Liguria, and ten years later visitor numbers had risen to around 200,000. In 1976 Franco Curti donated his work to the Capuchins in Liguria, in the hands of Father Romano da Calice, who operated it from 1976 to 1983. In 1984 Father Romano made way for a younger fellow Brother, Father Andrea Caruso, who kept up the tradition of a travelling exhibit of the Nativity around the convents of Liguria until 2006.

In 2007 the nativity began its new life as part of the collection of the Capuchin Cultural Heritage Museum.

“If the recreation of this event, as simple as it is, still attracts this many visitors and can bring forth some of its divine message after two thousand years, I think I can say that the 12,000 hours I have spent building this Nativity have not been wasted”. So Franco Curti in 1972.

What cannot be seen when looking at the scene are the 7 motors which power its movements; 307 bulbs modify the light to create day, dawn and night; 205 ball bearings and 273 synchronised wheels, pulleys and cogs move the characters. The fastest wheel is that of the motors (1400 rpm), the slowest that of the lights (1 revolution every 3 minutes).

The houses of the Nativity are entirely made in fretwork, and most of the statues were hand-sculpted by craftsmen of the Val Gardena. There are over 150 moving figures and the central section is a 40 square metres triptych consisting of reconstructions of Bethania, Jerusalem and Bethlehem in the time of Jesus. Completing the evocative Nativity scene are waterfalls, Eastern panoramas, dimmable lighting effects and background music.

The work is completed by 5 mechanical scenes representing the Prophecies of the Prophets Isaiah, Micah and Malachi, the “Search for lodging”, and the ”Adoration of the Magi”.
Open to the public every Christmas.

This sculpture is a unique piece in Ligurian art: a marble carved on both sides depicting St. Anthony of Padua with Jesus and the Virgin and Child. The work, recently curated for display, entered the museum's collections under a conventional attribution to the circle of Pierre Puget.

The sculpture was previously situated at one of the side entrances of the Villa Duchessa di Galliera in Voltri, leading to the nearby Capuchin church of San Francesco. Its exterior position exposed the marble to the effects of the elements, impoverishing the stone surface and compromising a proper interpretation of the sculpture's form, which thus takes on an unintentionally expressive quality, overpowering the lines of the sculptor’s original work.

The attribution of the work to the Puget sphere, to be discounted, reveals that the sculptor should be sought in an artist working in late 17th-century in Genoa, where from the 1660s and ‘70s, having absorbed the teachings of Puget and besides the Lombard workshops, the Genoese artist Filippo Parodi and a generation of artists who had perfected their training in Rome were to work. The unknown sculptor faced the task of rendering two distinct images in a single block of marble, skilfully joining the two sides together, where the profiles of the Saint and of Mary blend into a single face with androgynous features. The images draw on an established iconographic tradition in 17th-century Genoese painting: in his paintings, Valerio Castello proposed a dialogue of emotionally charged gestures and glances, as seen in the Mother and child in the altarpiece of the church of Santa Zita, or in the tender caress Jesus bestows on St Giovannino in the Nantes painting. This intimacy of pose is also found in Puget's Madonna Carrega, in which the Infant draws the attention of his pensive mother with his plump hand, although in that statue the artist focuses on depicting the emotional intensity of the encounter through the exchange of gazes between the characters. St. Anthony, in a standing position, holds the Infant as with a slight movement he withdraws his right leg, while on the opposite side the figure is gently animated through the use of a breeze flattening the cloak against the Virgin’s legs, as in the work of Puget and Parodi.

The evident assimilation of the Puget and Parodi models would suggests for the work a date in the last decade of the 17th century, when the sacred subject, its emotional qualities replaced with a lighter, more subdued tone, became gradually more stylised in its forms and features, such as a finer eye shape, duly seen in the two-sided sculpture in the Capuchin museum.

Recovered by Father Cassiano da Langasco from the Capuchin convent of Varazze  and of Santa Margherita Ligure respectively, these two grisailles depict a favourite subject in Capuchin worship: the Virgin appearing on Christmas night to Felix of Cantalice, who receives the Infant Jesus from her in the presence of Fra Lupo.

The painting from Varazze is generally agreed to be the work of Bernardo Strozzi, with Franco Pesenti being the first to present it as such for the exhibition “L’officina di Bernardo Strozzi” in 1981.

The scene's night-time setting, lit by the glow of the light coming from above, is successfully resolved by the adoption of the monochrome technique, based on cool tones and lifted by the use of whites which lend a vibrant quality to the image.

In the barely suggested space of the church, the artist places in the foreground the friar's kit for collecting alms, a superb still life, while behind the group of figures the inclusion of the clouds renders the space indistinct. The Madonna is seated on a cloud in the act of holding out the Christ Child to the saint, with an angel holding up her cloak behind her. The work is without doubt linked to the altarpiece of the same subject kept in the Capuchin church of the Santissima Concezione in Genoa, from which it differs in several respects.

According to Rita Dugoni, the monochrome is a sketch or model for the altarpiece, commissioned to Strozzi on the occasion of the Saint’s beatification in 1625.

The use of monochrome in the context of the artist's compositional processes is also evident in the Study for the Lamentation over the Dead Christ in the gallery of Palazzo Bianco in Genoa. A date prior to the 1620s was hypothesised by Franco Pesenti, who also believed the grisaille to have been designed independently and then  reused some years later to prepare the altarpiece of the church of the Concezione.

The second monochrome, which underwent major restoration work in 1965, is difficult to interpret as the original paint layer is compromised in several areas.

The painting is generally attributed to Giovanni Andrea De Ferrari. The presence of sections of remarkable quality, discernible in particular in the figure of the Virgin, in the angel's unfolded veil in the hands of Brother Felix, and of other less conceived areas featuring a more compact brushstroke, lead to the belief that the work is from the artist's studio, presumably worked on by the artist himself.

The presence of certain differences, when compared with the monochrome of sure Strozzi authorship is of some interest: a greater definition on the face of Felix, the modelling of Fra Lupo’s features, and the reduction of the knot grasped in the Angel's right hand, appear to be evidence of a stage of output falling somewhere between the monochrome of certain authorship and the altarpiece of the church of the Santissima Concezione.

This exquisite figurative work, cropped on all four sides, attracted the critical attention of both Maurizia Migliorini and Anna De Floriani in 1980. In publishing the results of important restoration work whose removal of crude, misguided repainting helped to restore full clarity to the image, the latter scholar suggested, also given the use of oak wood, a hypothetical parallel with the brushwork of an unknown painter, trained in the French style and active in the decades immediately following the mid-fifteenth century, “familiar with output mainly produced in the south of France”, as also later reaffirmed by Laura Martini. A sound approach which, while correcting Migliorini’s contemporaneous proposal of a proximity to the output of the “Nuremberg school of the second half of the 15th century”, nevertheless did not exclude the possibility of identifying the painter as a Ligurian artist, “unlikely to be an Italian from another region, except, perhaps from Piedmont”. As the scholar states in the same study, on the basis of key oral information passed down by Father Cassiano da Langasco, at some time in the 1940s the panel was in the Genoese church of San Bernadino, before being transferred in 1956-1957 to the convent of the Santissima Annunziata di Portoria, where it is still kept today. According to the learned Capuchin's information, the possibility cannot be excluded that the painting should be counted among the artefacts gathered between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th by Father Pietro da Voltaggio in the church of Santa Caterina di Genova. These artefacts came from religious complexes of the Franciscan order which were closed for worship following the suppressions of 1866.

The panel, probably part of a more complex polyptych - Migliorini in this regard thinks a “hinged triptych”  - within which it would have been in combination with a similar, now lost, painting depicting the Angelo annunciante (Announcing Angel), has recently been the subject of careful critical analysis. These studies revealed that the work rightfully belongs in the catalogue of Gandolfino da Roreto, with particular reference to his late 1490s output, closely connected to the polyptych signed “gandulfinus inxit” and dated 1493, depicting the Assunzione, santi e l’Incoronazione della Vergine (Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin with Saints, Turin, Galleria Sabauda), from the church of San Francesco in Alba. It was Giovanni Romano who recognised in the composition an example of the refined work of the Piedmont artist, an idea solidly confirmed in the studies of Simone Baiocco for whom the composition may even chronologically anticipate the early altarpiece conserved in Turin, in light of “a more direct link to that “Mediterranean” culture which can explain details such as the cloth forming the backdrop to the scene, or the Virgin's nimbus, created with a relief technique as was more customary in painting of the Spanish style”. These are elements to which, in certain respects, the fragile elegance of a distinctly early 15th-century flavour can be added, perceptible in the construction of the flowing folds of the gown, accentuated by exquisite brushstrokes rich with shiny material, much less evident in Gandolfino's later figurative style. Even considering the current lack of certain information regarding the possible historical placement of the work of which this element, perhaps actually conceived as a “folding door” (given the depictions to the reverse of symbols of the Passion, attributable without a doubt to the same hand) was a part, it may however be correct to consider the painting as coming at the very least from a convent of the same order, located in the southern Piedmont region and in particular in the Alessandria area, where the Asti artist's output was met with widespread approval; this work could be an expression of  the close network of cultural exchanges which had linked this area to the artistic events of Genoa since the late 14th century. Gandolfino was not unaware of this connection, and it was in fact a major influence on the creation of his exquisitely refined style. This link is distinctly evident in the Vergine annunciata (Virgin annunciate) in the convent of the Annunziata di Portoria, as well as in references to the art of Ludovico Brea, contacts which may have been originated by a young Gandolfino's familiarity with the Genoese scene or by his stay “elsewhere in the Ligurian region”; a situation in which, after an early training under his father Giovanni, himself a painter, Gandolfino may have begun to spread his own wings.

The centre of the antependium is dominated by the Franciscan coat of arms, standing out within a vibrant sunburst. The cross is surrounded by the motto of St. Paul: “ABSIT GLORIARI NISI IN CRUCE” (= “Never glory save in the cross”), from the epistle to the Galatians. The frame is trimmed with blue listels and embellished with a garland of alternating yellow and purple flowers.

The entire covering is in straw, and the particular way in which it is arranged on the surface (scales, herringbone, mosaic) produces extraordinary effects of light and colour, created by the direction of the fibres which reflect the light in countless different ways.

Its style, so geometrically severe, is austere yet elegant and graceful, and reveals a rationalistic predilection for details.

The piece's simple sobriety echoes the ideal of poverty in Capuchin life.

The work is signed by the artist to the reverse, on the upper part of the frame: “P.F. Raffaele da Genova 1879”.
Work restored in 2000 by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence.

From the early 1640s the career of Orazio De Ferrari was marked by a close sequence of altarpieces intended for the Capuchin churches. The first in the series is a painting, signed and dated 1643 and now kept in the church of Saints Nazario e Celso in Arenzano, portraying the meek figure of Spanish saint Felix of Cantalice for the devotion of the faithful. This is followed by the two Pontedecimo paintings, one of which is presented here (restored with state funds in 2009 by Aurelio Costa and Francesca Ventre), and the two altarpieces sent to Sardinia for the Capuchin foundations in Villasor and Quartu Sant’Elena. From the period of his full maturity comes one of the peaks of Orazio’s entire output, the Comunione della Maddalena (Last Communion of Mary Magdalene), a work intended for Porto Maurizio and now kept in Sanremo. Unfortunately, only a fragment survives of the upper part of the painting sent to Pontremoli - then part of the Province of Genoa. It should also be noted that the painter's will, drawn up on 14th September 1657 when the artist was dying of the plague, gives orders for the repayment of a sum to the Capuchins, probably a deposit received for a work that was destined never to see the light of day.

As mentioned, the restored painting came from the main altar of the church of Pontedecimo, and for many decades, prior to its restoration in Portoria, it was equipped with a mechanism in order for it to be used in the devout practice of “uncovering” (the usage to keep a painting covered, and unveil it only in given moments). During the restoration, the complex wooden framework and the metal perimeter strip used for the purpose were removed - although not destroyed - as their presence could no longer be justified. In doing so it emerged that the altarpiece had been reduced in size and that the metal strip had been concealing around 4 cm of painted canvas on each of the longer sides. Removal of the relatively limited repainting allowed the Virgin’s red gown, enriched with lacquers, to regain its original vivid hue; cleaning also restored the refined counterpoint of the mother-of-pearl greys characterising the patches on St Francis’ robe, as well as the rays of the aurora consurgens spreading over the imaginary landscape in the lower part, strewn with references to the Marian titles such as ianua, turris and fons (door, tower and fount).

As far as dating is concerned, I consider it reasonable to place the painting close to 1650, some years after the completion of construction work on the convent, a completion which the anonymous compiler of the Notizie del Convento di Pontexmo cavate dall’Archivio del medesimo Convento (Genoa, Archivio Provinciale dei Cappuccini, ms, after 1815) places in 1645.

St. Luke is the only one of the evangelists to specify that the announcement of the birth of Jesus to the shepherds took place while they were “keeping watch over their flock by night” (Luke 2:8), while it is St John who defines Christ as the “light of the world” (John 8:12, 9:5) which, much like the “great light... that the eyes could not bear” described in the Gospel of James (19:2), unifies and characterises not just the painting under consideration, but also illustrious prior examples. These range from Correggio's celebrated Notte (Nativity or The Holy Night) and Cambiaso’s renowned experimentations, to the altarpiece in Fermo by Rubens and subsequent versions from the local school, including Domenico Piola and Gaulli.

Thanks to restoration carried out by the Laboratorio delle Scuole Pie in 2007, the painting today is in good condition and its execution can be discussed with a certain confidence.

Initially the artist was thought to be Domenico Fiasella, who during his time in Rome would certainly have had the opportunity to appreciate many “candlelit” works by transalpine artists present in Rome at the same time, such as Van Baburen, Van Honthorst, and Terbrugghen, including the altarpiece intended for Fermo which Rubens worked on in the spring of 1608. This particular contact appears to be proved by a small painting, made known by Piero Boccardo and Anna Orlando, whose true protagonist, besides the iconographic subject, is the nocturnal atmosphere itself, in which can be discerned a shepherd “in a  semi-genuflected position of Cambiaso-esque origin which revises the corresponding Rubens figure, from which it also takes, reversing them, the gaze and gesture of the boy beside him”. In the same way, similar figurative parallels in the painting under consideration, very close in layout to the small painting in a private collection, can also be traced: notably the pointing figure on the right, while on the left is St Joseph leaning on a stick, and in the centre, the light of Christ the Saviour come to the world, gazed upon by the Virgin who, in the work here displayed, is not lifting her veil in Raphaelesque style, but lovingly encircles the straw crib in which the baby Jesus lies.

Despite this convincing attribution, it would be remiss to overlook the possible role played by the most skilled and loyal of Fiasella's collaborators, Giovanni Battista Casoni, by virtue of a brushstroke which is visibly looser and more dynamic when compared with Fiasella's customary technique, of particularly effective and softly modelling skin highlights, of a hollow mark used for the shepherds’ expressions, and of a certain hesitancy in the volumes typical of the way Casoni depicts his figures. Even the physiognomic qualities of the Virgin Mary’s face seem to be far from the known, firm Fiasella type and are, if anything, closer to certain paintings now conclusively attributed to his pupil.

When the work was donated to the Capuchin monks in 2002, it was registered as a copy after Van Honthorst, without any reference to the local school, which seems, without doubt, to be the more correct basis for reference. A timeline of output between the 1650s and ‘60s  would also seem to bear out the possibility that what we have before us is a work by Casoni, reminiscent of the Fiasella style but carried out with a certain autonomy of painting style and execution.