Giacomo Legi (or Liegi)

The reconstruction of the personality and work of the northern European painter Giacomo Legi is the product of an investigation that took its cue from the brief biography which Raffaele Soprani devotes to him in his Le vite de’ Pittori, Scoltori, et Architetti Genovesi, e de’ Forastieri, che in Genova operarono, published in 1674. This source has always proven to be very reliable, particularly for 17th century artists. One of the reasons for this is that Soprani was himself an amateur painter and obtained his information either at first hand or in any case relating to years very close to his own lifetime, if we consider, taking into account the time required for printing in the 17th century, that the text must have been virtually complete by the end of the 1660s. Soprani tells us that he did not wish to write biographies of living painters, whom he only mentions sporadically, yet those painters must, at the very least, have supplied him with specific information on their own masters.

Soprani devoted a brief biography to “Giacomo Legi” consisting of a mere fifteen lines that follow on from the more substantial biography that he devoted to “Giovanni Rosa”, in other words, Jan Roos¹.

The painter’s surname is very probably an Italianisation of Liège, the city in which he is likely to have been born and the then capital of the eponymous Prince Bishop’s principality – an area which, seen with the eyes of the time, could be generically defined as falling within the boundaries of “Flanders”. The principality, which included 23 “bonnes villes” along the Meuse in what is now Belgium, was fully encompassed within the territory ruled by Habsburg Spain, and was thus obviously Catholic in the painter’s day.

The fact that it was just over 100 km. from the 16th century art capital that was Antwerp, makes it all the more likely that the painter received his initial training in that city. The style of his still-lifes, particularly in terms of their composition, and more especially with reference to those “animated” by figures, reveals a debt to the prototypes of Frans Snyders (1579-1657), which were immensely popular in the early decades of the 17th century. This suggests that he is highly likely to have rubbed shoulders personally with Snyders, although we cannot rule out the possibility that he may have acquired his knowledge of Snyders’ work through the good offices of his brother-in-law, Jan Roos, known in documents and sources by the Italianised name of Giovanni Rosa (Antwerp, 1591 – Genoa, 1638)².

Legi’s family tie with Roos is mentioned by Soprani, whose account has recently spawned fresh archival research into the Genoese family of this painter³, who settled in the city in the mid 1610s and remained there until his death in 1638. In 1622, he had married a certain Benedetta Castagneto, the daughter of Raffaele († 1615), himself the son of Michele († 1610) who, so the documents inform us, was a cheesemaker. Raffaele, on the other hand, had grown wealthy by trading in silk and other precious fabrics (such as velvet, sarcenet and taffeta) in a shop in the vicinity of San Lorenzo, below the house of Carlo Fieschi⁴, and had married a certain Pellegrina Vigo. Pellegrina went through fully twenty pregnancies, all of them recorded in the parish records of San Lorenzo, the city’s cathedral⁵, although very few of the twenty children are likely to have survived the terrible infant mortality toll of the period. Benedetta, however, did survive and was wed to Legi, while one of her elder sisters, Vittoria (b. 1598) had married Ambrogio Camogli, the father of Stefano Camogli (1619/20 – 1690), who is known to us as a painter of still-lifes and flowers and whom it comes as no surprise to find listed among Roos’s pupils⁶, an exemplary figure of a style which I have labelled “Flemish-Genoese” and of which Legi is an equally crucial exponent. The style in question is the result of a unique combination and indissoluble mingling of two artistic cultures, the Flemish culture (especially that of Antwerp), and the early 17th century culture of naturalism in Liguria, with its capital in Genoa⁷.

The archives, for their part, fail to mention Legi’s marriage to a member of the Castagneto family, but he may still have been Roos’s brother-in-law through having married one of the latter’s sisters, possibly even before leaving Antwerp. What is certain is that, reflecting a dynamic typical of the more or less extended period of time that Flemish painters spent in Italy, they tended to stay with relatives residing in their newly adopted home town; and it is equally clear that the family bond also fostered a professional bond. For many of them, Rome was the first and most important goal of their study trip, and just as Jan Roos had been there c. 1614–16 before settling in Genoa, where there is likely to have been less competition and a great deal of work for northern European painters, so Legi, too, travelled to Rome. In fact, we cannot rule out the possibility that they may have journeyed south together. As we shall see below, Legi is most likely to have been in Rome in the years around 1615, and he may even have remained there longer than his brother-in-law.

As a result of research lasting several years, we can now finally be sure of Legi’s presence in Genoa in 1631 on a documentary basis, for he is mentioned in two documents, drafted in Genoa that year, “as Jacobus Leges”, the son of Odoardo⁸.

One of the reasons why the painting belonging to the Fundação Gaudium Magnum is of particular importance is that it provides confirmation of Legi’s time in Rome, a fact highlighted in earlier studies⁹. Rome is the only place where the two artists can have worked together on this canvas, each one painting the part for which he was responsible: Antiveduto the figures, Giacomo, or Jacobus, the still-life. The Christian name Jacobus was so common that it is difficult to identify him among the many northern European painters recorded in the city’s parishes in those years¹⁰. But regarding the date of Legi’s stay in the city – because Antiveduto, of course, resided in Rome on a permanent basis –, recent research has provided us with a fresh clue: on stylistic grounds, it is quite clearly Legi who is responsible for the ‘still-life’ parts of the painting, and for the donkey, in the Adoration of the Shepherds in the Galleria d’Arte Antica in Palazzo Barberini, in which the figures are the work of Domenico Fiasella (Sarzana, La Spezia, 1589 – Genoa, 1669)¹¹. Evidence of the collaboration between the two had, in fact, already been known for some time, but hitherto only in Genoa¹².

The lengthy formative sojourn that this Ligurian painter, who belonged to the same generation as Jan Roos and as Legi, spent in Rome, can be plausibly dated to between 1605 and 1616/17, the year in which we know him to have been in Genoa¹³ (so he must have been there for about five years during Caravaggio’s lifetime). This gives us a date ante quem for Legi’s presence in Rome, namely 1617, and provides confirmation of a reconstruction that had been attempted on purely stylistic grounds back in 1995¹⁴. Given that Flemish artists tended to travel to Italy at about the age of twenty, we may also reasonably surmise that he was born c. 1590/5, though probably closer to the earlier of the two dates because, as we shall see, the paintings that he produced in Rome are the work of an artist who was not only immensely talented but also, probably, fully trained.

So we can summarise the reconstruction of Legi’s biography thus: he was born c. 1590 in the Principality of Liège, the city to which he owes the name by which he is known; he trained in Antwerp, probably under Frans Snyders and, plausibly, together with Jan Roos c. 1605-1610. A few years later, around the middle of the first decade, he went to study in Rome, where he worked with a number of figure painters active in the city: certainly with Antiveduto Gramatica of Siena and Domenico Fiasella of Genoa. He may have travelled to Genoa with Fiasella, meeting up with his brother-in-law Jan Roos there and working in his workshop, albeit producing independent paintings with “flowers fruit & animals”, with or without figures¹⁵. He died, probably after Roos († 1638), in Milan, or so Soprani tells us. We have no cause to question Sporani’s assertion, but we need not necessarily interpret it as meaning that he worked in that city, and in any case, we need to await some kind of documentary and/or artistic evidence to confirm the fact.