Van Dyck’s Italy Was Bigger Than Genoa — and a New Genoa Exhibition Argues the Case
A major exhibition in Genoa is reframing Anthony van Dyck (Flemish, 1599–1641) as an artist whose ambitions, itinerary, and emotional range were distinctly European — and far less geographically fixed than the standard story suggests. “Van Dyck: The European. The Journey of a Genius from Antwerp to Genoa and London,” now on view at the Palazzo Ducale, brings together portraits and religious works to track the painter’s movement across Italy and, later, his rapid ascent in England.
Among the show’s most closely watched loans is an altarpiece from the church of San Michele di Pagana, a small town on the eastern Ligurian Riviera, which has never traveled before. The painting, “Francesco Orero Presented to the Dying Christ by Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Bernard of Clairvau” (ca. 1626–27), is presented as evidence of a side of Van Dyck that is often eclipsed by his courtly portraits: his capacity for religious imagery that is physically immediate and emotionally direct. Curator Orlando described the work’s impact in visceral terms, arguing that its scale and presence turn the crucified Christ into an image of pain, sacrifice, and passion that reads as profoundly human.
That emphasis on devotion is central to the exhibition’s thesis. The show positions Van Dyck not simply as a virtuoso of aristocratic likeness, but as a painter for whom Catholic faith could be treated as an intense emotional experience — a framework that helps explain the urgency and tenderness that can surface even in his most polished commissions.
The exhibition also advances new research on Van Dyck’s Italian years. One persistent misconception, according to the curator, is that the artist largely stayed in Genoa during his time in the country. Scholarship undertaken for the show argues instead for a much wider circuit, including travel across Italy and an almost certain stay in Naples — a visit that had previously been proposed only cautiously.
The narrative of movement is sharpened by a dramatic episode from 1624, when Van Dyck was quarantined in Palermo, Sicily, amid a severe outbreak of plague. During that period he began painting the city’s plague saint, Rosalia. The exhibition includes “Saint Rosalie Interceding for the Plague–Stricken of Palermo” (1624–25), on loan from the Wellington Collection in London, a work that anchors the show’s interest in how crisis, belief, and local cults shaped his imagery.
Elsewhere, the checklist underscores the breadth of Van Dyck’s subjects and the international reach of the loans. Highlights include “Samson and Delilah” (ca. 1619–20) from Dulwich Picture Gallery in London; “Portrait of the Princes Palatine” (1637) from the Louvre in Paris; and “Mary Ruthven, Lady Van Dyck” (1640) from the Prado in Madrid. The exhibition also points to the artist’s Genoese portraiture, including “Portrait of Alessandro, Vincenzo and Francesco Maria Giustiniani Longo” (ca. 1626–1627), now in The National Gallery, London.
Van Dyck’s story ultimately turns north. In 1632 he relocated to London and quickly became a favored painter of King Charles I, whose patronage helped propel the artist into the center of English cultural life. Van Dyck is widely credited with transforming English portraiture through a style that fused elegance with psychological acuity — a legacy cut short by his death in 1641, at 42.
“Van Dyck: The European. The Journey of a Genius from Antwerp to Genoa and London” is on view through July 19 at the Palazzo Ducale, Piazza Giacomo Matteotti, Genoa, Italy. Taken together, its newly argued travel map and its insistence on Van Dyck’s religious intensity propose a painter whose sophistication was never merely social — it was also spiritual, mobile, and unmistakably continental.
