Von Maron a Genova: il Ritratto di Geronima Gentile Cambiaso

The portrait of Gaetano Cambiaso - painted by Anton von Maron during the fifteen months of his stay in Genoa, between February 1792 and May 1793 – has been identified in 1999. This essay is dedicated to the painting originally conceived as its pendant: the portrait of that gentleman’s wife, Geronima Gentile Cambiaso. With his usual, extraordinary skill and sensitivity, Maron depicts this young bride dressed in the latest French fashion and surrounded by objects that qualify her as a lady of refined and updated gout, in painting as well as in music: infact, she can play the most recent Paisiello’s Piano Sonatas and paints miniatures in the style of Anton Raphael Mengs, the Maron’s “maestro”, father-in-law and artistic sponsor. This painting, joined by descent in a private Genoese collection, enriches the catalog of the Austrian painter as well as that of the works commissioned to him in Genoa by the Cambiaso, a family newly ascribed to nobility (1751), but immensely rich, ambitious and rapidly growing in both political and social fields during the last decades of the Republic of Genoa, before the Revolution (1797). Two members of the Cambiaso family became Doges in this period: Giovanni Battista (1770-1772), the father of Gaetano, and Michelangelo (1791-1793), his cousin and brother-in-law. The bride of the first was portrayed in 1770 by Mengs (it was the unique work made by this celebrated master in Genoa), the second – who promoted his temporary transfer from Rome to Genoa – was the most prominent and cultivated of Genoese Maron's patrons.