Starting from the first commissions in the early seventeenth century to some great artists like Antoon Van Dyck by Gio Francesco Brignole, even the successors, beginning with his wife Maria Durazzo, continued this policy by significantly expanding the rich art collections of Palazzo Rosso in Genoa, also thanks to inherited legacies.
Today the gallery is characterized both by Flemish portraits and by paintings by Guido Reni, Guercino, Mattia Preti, Bernardo Strozzi, as well as by Venetian boards and canvases of the 16th century, among which it is worth mentioning works by Palma il Vecchio and Veronese.
Between 1953 and 1961 important restorations were carried out, thanks to which the exhibition spaces more than doubled, following a different arrangement of the gallery, also including works not belonging to the historical core, such as the ceramics collection and the numismatic collection previously located elsewhere.
The textile collection was also from different origins, for which a storage room was created on that occasion. Moreover, the drawing and print cabinet, the topographical collection, and the cartographic collection found their place in the mezzanine between the first and second main floors. After 1992, a new organization was implemented, prioritizing the recovery and exhibition of all the works belonging to the Brignole-Sale collection, previously partly moved to Palazzo Bianco and partly in storage.
“For the formation of a public gallery”: with these words, in the 1884 will, the Duchess of Galliera expressed her intention to dedicate the palace as a public space, with the prospect of increasing the artworks already contained within it, constituting the first core of the civic museum.
From 1887 onwards it was enriched with numerous private collections and the municipality itself intervened with a prudent acquisition policy. The current layout of the rooms and the transformation into a picture gallery result from the transfer of sculptures and frescoes to other museum venues and from the reorganization following the post-war reconstruction of the palace; the restoration of the palace and reorganization of the collections were decided by a committee composed of Orlando Grosso, Carla Mazzarello, Genoa City Council’s Arts Councillor, Caterina Marcenaro, director of Fine Arts of the Municipality, Mario Labì, architect, and Franco Albini, architect, whose intervention is considered one of the most significant works of Italian rationalism aimed at historical recovery.
The arrangement of the collections was curated by Carla Mazzarello. The palace was opened to the public in 1950. The picture gallery offers an overview of European painting from the 16th to the 18th century, with a large prevalence of Genoese, Flemish, French, Spanish painters.
There are exhibited 16th-century paintings by Paolo Caliari known as Veronese, Filippino Lippi, Giorgio Vasari, Luca Cambiaso and an important documentation of Flemish and Dutch painting from the 16th to the 18th century, among which works of Pieter Paul Rubens, Antoon Van Dyck, and Gerard David can be found. Among the French and Spanish authors of the 17th-18th centuries are Francisco de Zurbaran, Bartolomeo Esteban Murillo, Jose de Ribera, and Simon Vouet.
