|
The Palazzo Brignole Sale (dubbed Palazzo Rosso because of the colour of its stucco exterior) was erected between 1671 and 1679 on the prestigious Strada Nuova (present-day Via Garibaldi) in Genoa. The decoration of the palazzo was accomplished in two phases. In 1687-89 the team of Domenico Piola and Gregorio de Ferrari - with the assistance of Niccolò di Viviano Codazzi (1642-1693), Antonio Maria Haffner (1654-1732) and Sebastiano Monchi (c. 1630-1706) - painted the east wing, including the south loggia, then in 1691-92 the frescoes in the rooms of the west wing were executed by Giovanni Andrea Carlone with the assistance of Antonio Maria Haffner and Carlo Antonio Tavella (1668-1738). The quadratura painter Antonio Maria Haffner worked both for the Piola-Ferrari and Carlone teams.
The south loggia (shown in the photo) was painted by Paolo Gerolamo Piola together with Nicolò Codazzi (1642-1693), the son of Viviano Codazzi. It is one of the few surviving examples of the typology of the "room in ruins" that so delighted a Baroque society fond of surprises. In the 1680s the Piola workshop had created a variant of the type in which the supposed ruin is neither a structure from antiquity nor one from centuries past, but a fully modern one. In the loggia of the Palazzo Rosso the simulated ruin is developed out of the actual structure: isolated chunks of the plaster and the cornice have fallen. The subject is a scene with the shepherd Endymion and the moon goddess Selene-Diana. Through an imaginary opening in the centre of the vault the goddess is floating down toward her sleeping lover.
| 
