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The picture shows the ceiling painting with mock portico architecture in the Salone on the piano nobile in the Palazzo Spinola Gambaro in Genoa. In the centre panel Domenico Piola's Janus and Hercules in Olympus with Personification of Peace can be seen.
For Baroque fresco decorations it was necessary to create 'quadratura' - perspective produced with the aid of a grid of squares - based on architectural principles. Most painters of quadratura, whether for stage sets or in the context of decorative painting, were either architects or specialists in the proper rendering of foreshortened architecture. They were accordingly ill-equipped for the depiction of figures, the very reason for the existence of ceiling pictures. Consequently, they were required to collaborate with figure painters (pittori figuristi), and there were any number of such collaborations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Tassi and Domenichino, Tassi and Guercino, Colonna and Albani, Haffner and Canuti, and Mengozzi Colonna and Tiepolo, to name only a few. Teams like these frequently worked together for years.
One of the most spectacular ceilings of this type is found in the Palazzo Spinola Gambaro in Genoa, evidence of perfect cooperation between Domenico Piola and the quadratura painter Paolo Brozzi (active 1660s). The dimensions of the room and the ceiling height favoured the resulting harmony between grandiose illusionary architecture in the form of a circling portico and figural additions reflecting the subject matter of the centre panel, an allegory of peace.
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