Alessi, Galeazzo

ALESSI, GALEAZZO. - Architect, b. in Perugia probably in 1512, d. there on 30 Dec. 1572. Having trained almost certainly in Rome in contact with Michelangelo, after returning to Umbria, where minor works are attributed to him, he moved in 1548 to Genoa. Roman proportions, through A.'s style, find in the Genoese landscape and environment a new imprint that resolves itself aristocratically in the formal definition of the patrician palace and villa. The church of S. Maria di Carignano renews in its plan the Bramantesque conception of St. Peter's, but rises in elevation, solemn in the interior, with more serene forms on the exterior, with pictorial chiaroscuro effects that open the way to the Baroque evolution. The villas Cambiaso and delle Peschiere, balanced in their masses, closely coordinated in their architectural elements, soberly ornamented and immersed in the greenery of the gardens facing the sea, would echo on the surrounding hills in infinite variations, so that the entire Ligurian architecture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may rightly be called Alessi's.

With the Palazzo Cambiaso he began the Strada Nuova (now via Garibaldi), and in Milan, for the Genoese De Marini, he built the larger and richer Palazzo Marino, together with the churches of Santa Maria presso S. Celso and of S. Vittore al Corpo.

The pictorial and functional value of Alessi's architecture struck Rubens, who published in Antwerp in 1622 the surveys of all the palaces of Genoa. - See Pl. LXIII.

Carlo Ceschi