GIOVANNI BATTISTA PAGGI (1554-1627)

GIOVANNI BATTISTA PAGGI (1554-1627) Madonna and Child with St. Dominic Oil on canvas, 99 x 84 cm Signed on the pages of the book The signature on the pages of the book held up by the Virgin confirms the attribution of this unpublished painting to the Genoese painter Giovanni Battista Paggi, which the stylistic features alone make evident. It is possible to read the inscription, in the typical characters of the elegant Roman square capital always used by the cultured aristocratic painter, "GIO. BATTA/"", followed, on the vertical side of the book, by the surname PAGGI, not very readable because abraded. In any case the facial type of the Virgin is unequivocal, as are the treatment of the drapery and the palette, in this painting datable to the 17th century. A cleaning could better clarify the entity of the changing colours that in the career of Paggi, who lived twenty years in Florence between 1580 and 1600 (in exile for the sentence of murder in absentia), are in Tuscany more marked and virtuosistic, and after the return to Genoa more limited, in favour of a more realistic palette. This, for obvious reasons: both for the adherence to a local trend that he himself, after Luca Cambiaso, contributed to consolidate in its peculiar stylistic features, and for the different mood of the time since, after Caravaggio, whose works circulated in Genoa in originals or copies already within the first decade of the new century, a new vision of reality, more direct, was gradually imposing itself. In the beautiful canvas destined to a private collection of devotion, where the inclusion of the figure of St. Dominic may be linked to an onomastic reason of the client or to his particular devotion to this saint, Paggi makes the scene colloquial. He had learned this from Luca Cambiaso, in whom, however, the religious motivations of adherence to the Counter-Reformation are more evident. Here, the gestures, the poses and the gazes attenuate the effect of conventionality in favour of naturalness, making this new work very pleasant. The subject of the Madonna and Child, accompanied or not by the figure of St Joseph or another saint, was evidently dear to his patrons, so much so that it was repeated several times by Paggi throughout his career: both for altarpieces and for room paintings like this one, and in drawings destined or not to be translated on a large scale on canvas (see A. Orlando, Dipinti genovesi dal Cinquecento al Settecento. Ritrovamenti dal collezionismo privato, Turin 2010, pp. 152-153). Anna Orlando 2021