The collection of portraits on cerulean paper by Ottavio Leoni (Rome, 1578–1630) preserved in Genoa's civic collections comprises 50 sheets and is of great importance in terms of quality and chronological variety, spanning the master's entire career from the late 16th century to the first thirty years of the 17th century. The range of characters documented in the portraits is also very varied, providing a vivid snapshot of Roman society in the early 17th century. Their names have been identified thanks to historical and artistic research and the inscriptions on the sheets, some autographed, others from collections, sometimes partially faded and cut. Among the figures ‘photographed’ by Leoni, the Genoese collection includes portraits of nobles, such as Vittoria Caetani dell'Aquila d'Aragona, Marquis Paris Pinelli, and Alessandro VII Sforza, Duke of Segni; portraits of princes and princesses, such as Maria Felice Peretti or the Prince of Castiglione; cardinals, such as Monsignor Gerolamo Grimaldi, Cardinal of Trinità dei Monti; but also figures from different social backgrounds, prominent in Rome at the time, such as the composer and organist Paolo Quagliati. There are also faces that have remained ‘anonymous’, both aristocrats and humble commoners: examples include the sheets with ‘Portraits of a man and a woman’ or those with ‘A monk and a child’, depicted individually and then arranged in pairs within a single blue paper passe-partout with an elegant gold border by a collector between the 18th and 19th centuries. The sheets in Genoa belong to different periods of Ottavio Leoni's career: there are older portraits, dating back to the end of the 16th century and characterised by more marked and continuous contours, more insistent, outlined only in black “pencil” (an example is a “Portrait of a young man”); others in which black pencil strokes are accompanied by white chalk, as in the case of the famous “Portrait of Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua”, depicted here; and finally, others dating back to the last phase of the artist's career, between the second and third decades of the 17th century, in which there is a more nuanced use of red and black pencils and chalk, with more delicate strokes and soft coloured shading: This period includes, for example, the Portrait of the Prince of Castiglione, or the two “Portraits of a Man and a Woman”, mounted in a single passe-partout, in which the use of red pencil is highly characteristic. Some of Ottavio Leoni's drawings preserved in the Drawings and Prints Cabinet of Palazzo Rosso - all of which came into the collection through Marcello Durazzo's bequest to the civic library in 1848 - bear the inscription “Ulisse Aldrovandi 1799”, an interesting indication of their previous provenance from the collections of Count Ulisse Aldrovandi, patron, collector and amateur painter of the late 18th century, of the Aldrovandi Marescotti family of Bologna. Aldrovandi, an academic of fine arts together with his brother Carlo Filippo, was in contact with artists and writers in his city and had established a sort of academy in his own home, where he had gathered paintings - particularly Nordic ones - but also drawings, prints and art books. Portrait of Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua.

Painting on rectangular canvas depicting a view of the port of Genoa. The work is signed in the lower right corner with the initials ‘D.C.’.

Portrait of a gentlewoman.

Domenico Piola painted the vaults of the last two east rooms of the second piano nobile of Palazzo Rosso between 1687 and 1688, as the balances of payments concerning him attest. This was the period following his return from the journey-escape undertaken in 1684, following the French bombardment of the city, which took him to various places in northern Italy and especially to Parma, where he had the opportunity to compare and update on Correggio's solutions his way of conceiving painted space in relation to architectural space. This experience, and, at the same time, the contact with Gregorio De Ferrari, his son-in-law and pupil, gave his language a looser lightness, especially in the practice of a lighter and less full-bodied use of color, which is associated with a taste for open space and for composition understood in a rotating sense. These elements are discernible in the design of the rooms with the allegories of Autumn and Winter, where Domenico availed himself of the collaboration of the plasterer Giacomo Muttone and the Bolognese quadraturist Stefano Monchi. The theme of Autumn is resolved with the traditional depiction of the triumph of Bacchus. The vault depicts, bathed in a clear diffused light, the god not intent, however, on unbridled celebrations, but young, beardless, caught in a moment of quiet tenderness when, having arrived on the island of Naxos, he met Ariadne, abandoned there by Theseus, fell in love with her and wanted her as his bride. The result is a painting in which drawing, as the structuring element of the image, gives way to color, which, through slight light transitions, shapes bodies and spatial planes. The Bacchic, animated and lively thiasus is relegated to the margins of the composition: intoxicated Silenus, bacchants, centaurs, satyrs and the animals dear to Dionysus - goats, panthers, monkeys - master lunettes and corbels with more vivid and plastic chromatic registers, in pleasing, dialogic contrast with the vault. The beautiful gilded stucco frieze running along the four sides of the room, in a continuous succession of vine shoots, not only reiterates the theme of the season but also gives the cue for the decorative motif of the frame of the large mirror placed between the windows. In the Winter Room, Piola implements absolute freedom in the layout of space. The plastic intertwining of the bodies of the winter winds is contrasted by Winter, exceptionally young and clothed in pale, warming himself at the brazier, with Marzo or Favonio behind him, while allusions to carnival and hunting, enriched with exotic animals and characters, enliven the edges of the vault, barely contained by a mighty painted balustrade. Scenes of banquets, musicians, idleness, playful brawls, or children's games make for an overall lively and dynamic reading of this fresco, both thematically and in terms of the perception of the painted space, an effect accentuated by Nicolò Codazzi's trompe-l'œil architectural perspectives on the walls. Fresco allegory of autumn and winter.

The work depicts Ophelia. She is one of the main female characters in the tragedy Hamlet (The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, in the original language), written between 1600 and 1602 by the British playwright William Shakespeare.

Painting on canvas depicting two young people at the harbour saying goodbye before the sailor's departure.

Painting on rectangular canvas depicting the port area of Genoa in the mid-19th century.