CASTELLO, BERNARDO. - Painter, b. in Genoa in 1557, d. there on 4 October 1629. He was a pupil of Andrea Semino; but, drawn by the art of Luca Cambiaso, he soon approached the latter's manner. Still young, having gone to Ferrara and become a friend of Torquato Tasso, in 1586 he illustrated the latter's Gerusalemme liberata.
He then returned to Genoa, where he devoted himself to his activity as an eclectic painter, tied to the most varied currents of Mannerism, executing, among other things, altarpieces for the churches of S. Francesco, S. Siro, S. Maria di Castello, and frescoing Genoese palaces and villas. In 1604 he was in Rome; and then, for a short time, in Turin. He had friendships with poets and men of letters, above all with Chiabrera, to whom he owes much of his fame, perhaps greater than his real merits.
His brother, GIOV. BATTISTA (1547-1637), was a noted painter and miniaturist, a disciple of Cambiaso.
(photo Alessi)
Far superior to his father Bernardo was VALERIO, b. in Genoa in 1624, d. there on 17 October 1659: a disciple of Fiasella and of G. A. De Ferrari, he trained in Milan on the works of Procaccini (also active in Genoa) and then in Parma in contact with the art of Correggio. His particular sensitivity to color suggests that he looked to Venetian painting, felt perhaps through the mediation of Rubens and van Dyck.
The art of C. is among the most spontaneous and personal of the Genoese Seicento: refined and lively in color, he felt, and in a very high manner, the value of the vibrant and dynamic line.
In the frescoes, more than in the canvases, this pictorial dynamism of his, all coloristic preciousness and full of refined elegances, has a way of fully realizing itself and revealing the maximum of his creative qualities, which truly seem to anticipate even the painting of the Settecento. In his sketches there is sometimes something like an anticipation of the art of Alessandro Magnasco.
Among the most significant works are cited the Danaids (A. Doria gallery, Genoa); the Marriage of the Virgin (Spinola gallery, Genoa); the Virgin of the Veil (museum of the Civil Hospitals, Genoa); the sketch of the Rape of the Sabines (De Ferrari coll., Genoa); and, among the frescoes, those that adorn the hall of the Palazzo Balbi, also in Genoa.