Gioacchino Assereto

Gioacchino Assereto, who ranks as one of the foremost members of the 17th century Ligurian school and one of the greatest naturalists in the whole of 17th century Italian painting, was born in Genoa in 1600 and trained in his native city under Luciano Borzone (1590-1645). With Borzone being only ten years older than Assereto, the two artists’ careers ran largely in parallel, in the crucial decades stretching from 1620 to 1650. Assereto is likely to have studied under Borzone c. 1612-1618, judging by the indications provided by Raffaele Soprani, his first biographer, who tells us that it was his elder brother who set him on the path to painting and got him into Borzone’s «stanza» or workshop «at the age of twelve»¹.

A few years later, indicatively some time between 1618 and 1630, Assereto pursued his training with Andrea Ansaldo (1584-1638), a painter who was roughly a generation older. He was also far more Mannerist and less modern than his other two counterparts, who embraced a realism that was mingled in Genoa with a naturalism – in both expressive and painterly terms – grafted onto the local late Mannerism of Antoon Van Dyck (1590-1644). From Van Dyck, who worked in Genoa on more than one occasion between 1621/2 and 1627, Borzone picked up the technique of painting in “velature” with light layers of colour and a modulated treatment of shadow, while Assereto, on the other hand, emulated the expressive intensity, which, while never loud, was nonetheless expressed with determination and strength, that Van Dyck put into his portraits and maybe even more effectively into his religious works, which are imbued with the same pathos that we find in Assereto’s future work.

Yet it was Ansaldo, far more than Borzone, who set Assereto on the path to the construction of compositions with several figures and more complex settings, given that he was also far more in demand for fresco work. In fact, it may well be with him that Assereto was introduced to the technique of fresco, although he then failed to pursue it in any depth in the course of his career. His known frescoes amount to a handful of sporadic episodes. He frescoed a chapel in the church of Sant’Agostino², probably to a commission from Giovan Carlo Doria (see below) c. 1620-1622; the vaults at the end of the side aisle in the church of the Annunziata, to a commission from the Lomellini family c. 1625³; and a drawing room in Palazzo Ayrolo Negrone in 1644, together with a painter from Savona named Raffaellino Bottalla (1613-1644), who had recently returned from a fruitful apprenticeship under Pietro da Cortona in Rome.

Assereto painted his first dated work in 1623⁴, the year in which he embarked on a career as a fully trained and successful painter in his own right.

In the early 1620s, he had an opportunity to enrich his sources of inspiration without leaving his native city, by frequenting the home of his patron Giovan Carlo Doria and the latter’s brother Marcantonio Doria. Marcantonio, an enthusiastic art collector, had commissioned not only Caravaggio’s St. Ursula, which was shipped from Naples to Genoa in 1610, but also work by Ribera and Bernardo Azzolino, with an interesting selection of work by Neapolitan artists in his collection, which Assereto’s output shows us he quite clearly investigated on more than one occasion.

Where Giovan Carlo is concerned, Assereto also attended the sessions of the “accademia del disegno” or drawing academy that he had set up in his home. Drawing “from life” was a formative moment which Assereto shared with other young painters, providing him with an opportunity for interaction and even rivalry, if the coeval sources are to be believed. He also worked cheek by jowl in the palazzo in Via del Gelsomino⁵ with Bernardo Strozzi (1582-1644), whom he appears on more than one occasion to emulate outright⁶, and with the Milanese painter Giulio Cesare Procaccini (1574-1625).

Lombard influence figures strongly in Assereto’s earlier works, those in which he gradually shakes off the Mannerism that shines through in glaring hues typical of the Milanese artists (Morazzone, as well as Procaccini) and in languid expressions reminiscent of Strozzi’s work in those years.

In 1639 Assereto journeyed to Rome, a trip which, Soprani tells us, disappointed him enormously because, even though he visited «almost all the painters’ workshops…”, he failed to find “that excellence that he imagined them to have»⁷.

This brief pause was followed by the final decade in his career, rich in masterpieces which, in actual fact, point to a wealth and multiplicity of sources of inspiration – particularly of Caravaggesque origin – that it is hard to imagine can have come solely from a local context, even if Genoa was permeated with paintings marked by Caravaggio’s new realistic style⁸.

In his maturity, Assereto veered more decisively in the direction of the Baroque. Without ever leaving the furrow of naturalism, he became from more daring in terms of his compositions, with bold foreshortening, diagonals and diminishing lines, and emphatic, expressive gestures. This, however, without ever overdoing things, because he was determined to remain loyal to a mode of expression that set out from realism in order to achieve realism (or at least, the realistic).

In addition to a number of rare portraits, Assereto specialised in “storied” pictures, drawing his inspiration primarily from the Scriptures. In many of them, he succeeds in achieving a singularly expressive intensity, which can indeed be seen also in the painting belonging to the Gaudium Magnum Foundation.

Assereto’s rediscovery by modern scholarship is the work of Roberto Longhi, the first to perceive his stature, judging him to the «spirited», «lively» and «fervent»⁹. It was an article that Longhi published in “Dedalo” in 1926-1927 that de facto triggered scholarly interest in Assereto’s work¹⁰.

That article was followed by a number of more in-depth studies on the part of various scholars (including, in particular, Gian Vittorio Castelnovi, Franco Renzo Pesenti and Marta Ausserhofer), the most recent of which was a voluminous catalogue raisonné published by Tiziana Zennaro in 2011¹¹.