Basilica of the Santissima Annunziata del Vastasto

The Basilica of the Santissima Annunziata del Vastasto It is a Catholic place of cult of Genoa, located in Piazza della Nunziata, in the Pè district. It is one of the most representative churches of the Genoese art of late mannerism and, above all, of the baroque of the early seventeenth century. His parish community is part of the Vicariate “Center West” of the Archdiocese of Genoa. ^[first]

From the humiliated friars to the Franciscan friars [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

The place where the church was already occupied by a community of humiliated friars from Lombardy, who in 1228 had built a convent and the small church of Santa Marta del Prato. This church, small in proportions, approximately occupied the space of the current presbytery.

The choice of the site had been conditioned by the presence of two Rivi, the Rio di Carbonara and the Rio di Vallechiara, today no longer visible because they are already channeled in the seventeenth century in underground galleries close to the Basilica. The religious community needed these waterways because it was dealing with the processing of wool. In addition, many spaces had become usable, because the area had been flattened for safety reasons following the construction of the new city walls of Barbarossa (1155). Hence the toponym of Counterattack (and guastum O vastinium , that is, demolition), with which they were called i fault or the cuts external to the walls, without trees or other who could provide shelter to any attackers. On this broken down Genoese crossbows came to practice.

In 1508 the buildings still present were assigned to the conventual Franciscan friars from the church of San Francesco di Castelletto, abandoned due to other works to the city walls. It was the Franciscans who started a new construction, better responding to their liturgical needs and their predictory pastoral directed to the people.

The works began on 20 July 1520, when the first stone was placed with a solemn ceremony in the presence of the bishop of Agrigento Monsignor Giuliano Cybo.
The church was built in late Gothic forms to respect the artistic style of the Mother Church of the Franciscan Order, that is, the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, and was immediately dedicated to their patron saint, with the name of San Francesco del Guasto. It was an anachronistic and disproportionate construction; In fact, columns with white and black stripes were made, emblem of the local Gothic (still present under the seventeenth -century grouting: the bombings of the Second World War, causing the marble slabs and the coating stuccos to collapse, had brought to light these round columns in Rocchi Bianchi and Neri), in the middle of the Renaissance, and in an exaggerated dimension for that style suitable for more contained relationships.

However, the church was not completed: the works stopped after the erection of the load -bearing walls and the closure of the roof; The internal decorations were few and simple, also for a logic of Franciscan poverty. Even the facade was not built, because the space for Piazza della Nunziata was not the property of the friars but was occupied by other buildings.
Despite everything, the church had monumental proportions: a large central nave and two lateral naves flanked, each, by a row of chapels; A transept and a square -based presbytery. At the cross between transept and central nave a tiburium had been superimposed. The overall dimensions of the building just described are estimated at around 33 x 54 meters.

In 1537 the Conventuals left the wast to return to the church and the convent of San Francesco di Castelletto, made to be accessible again after the rearrangements of the walls. The church of San Francesco del Guasto was therefore intended for the Observant Franciscan friars, forced to leave the convent of the Holy Annunciation of Portoria for new works on the city walls, which brought with them to the new headquarters the title of the previous church: thus was born the Most Holy Annunziata del Vastato.

The great post -post -concentration transformation [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

The sixteenth -century vicissitudes of the Catholic Church, with the Protestant Reform and, therefore, the Council of Trent, were the indirect cause of a radical transformation of the Basilica. In 1582, in fact, Monsignor Francesco Bossi, bishop of Novara, arrived in Genoa to verify the compliance of the Genoese diocese to the dictates of the Tridentine Council.
He dedicated three pages of his very detailed relationship ^[2] to the Church of the Annunziata, in which all the works to be carried out and with what times were indicated, so that the building was adequate to the new dictates.

The friars were obliged to study an almost total renewal of the building and, above all, to find someone who financed such a construction site. So it was that in 1591 the Giuspatronato of the Major Chapel to the very rich family of the Lomellini, master of Tabarca in grace of the concession received in 1544 at the time of Andrea Doria, in the grace of which he had the flourishing trade trade in the time. The Lomellini undertook to pay and direct all the works, in exchange for the use of the Church as a family chapel. Under their patronage, the greatest artistic-architectural-pectal company of the Genoese seventeenth century was created, structurally resolved in the coating of a medieval false skeleton.

The Lomellini commissioned Taddeo Carlone to create the first architectural adjustments, that is, the extension of the presbytery with the construction of the apse, so as to find space for the choir, and the replacement of the thiburium with a high drum dome.

Starting from 1615 the construction site was directed by Giovanni Domenico Casella called Scorticone and Giacomo Porta. These took care of the extension of the building to the current Piazza della Nunziata of a span and a half, after the friars had purchased the buildings that prevented the work (the barn of the Balbi family, the oratory of San Tommaso and the Osteria di Santa Marta), taking care to give a first non -definitive form to the facade. But above all they made the sculptural decoration of the church with marble, stones, stucco and gold, agreeing with the two painters who would then have painted the remaining boxes remained free: Giovanni and Giovanni Battista Carlone.

The pictorial cycles [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

Giovanni Carlone put his hand to fresco decoration in the second half of the 1920s, starting to paint the episodes scheduled for the transept: Pentecost , Disbelief of San Tommaso , Transfiguration It is Disciples of Emmaus . He then continued with the first three spans of the central nave, in which he painted The adoration of the Magi , Entry into Jerusalem It is Prayer in the garden of olive trees (in all likelihood he also painted some of the frescoes of the side naves).
At this point he interrupted to go to work on the decoration of the church of Sant’Antonio Abate of the Teatini Fathers in Milan, but in 1631, shortly after starting to paint for the latter saleswoman, he died suddenly.

It was his brother Giovanni Battista who completed the works that remained unfinished in Milan and Genoa. The Annunciation painted the remaining spans of the central nave ( The resurrection , Risen Jesus greets Mary before climbing the sky It is Maria Incoronata ) and the spans of the lateral naves that still had to be finished. In the meantime, in a period that has not yet been possible to understand, Gioacchino Asreto also worked on some frescoes, which painted the first times of the lateral naves ( Eleazaro and Rebecca al Pozzo It is Pietro and Giovanni restore the cripple in front of the Bella Porta ).

The time has come to decorate the most important places of the building, the Lomellini turned to Andrea Ansaldo, to whom they asked to put his hand first of all to the dome. The artist worked uninterruptedly for three years, until the death in 1638. The complex perspective machine is articulated with the frescoes and the all -round gold figures that cover, with ascending rhythm, the entire surface of the plumes, the drum , the dome and the top lantern. The central theme corresponds to the dedication of the temple, the Ascension of the Virgin . The vertical tension of the complex starts with the four great fresco figures of the plumes, i Four evangelists , among which the young Giovanni stand out with the pen raised and the screwed figure of the elderly and bearded Marco, who exhibits a mighty musculature. Four couples of young nudes hold the Marian coat of arms on the top of the arches in the blue field. In the circles of the drum, the four windows are framed by golden caryatids that seem to support the dome, and pairs of all -round gold puttini. They alternate architectures painted with wrong columns and balustrades from which the disciples painted in Trompe-L’œil protrude. In the dome the painted architectures continue the real ones of the church, and from an arcone you can see the Assumption surrounded by various biblical characters. The ascension vortex ends in the windshield where God the Father is depicted.

In 1783 Agostino Lomellini, the last exponent of the family, former doge of the Republic of Genoa from 1760 to 1762, obtained from Pope Pius VI that the Church was declared a declared noble parish of the Lomellini, but it was only for a few years: with his death in 1794 the Casato died out. The religious had to abandon the convent in 1810 for the laws of Napoleonic suppression, but they returned to you in 1815. Pope Pius VII, in transit to Genoa on the return journey to Rome after the Napoleonic imprisonment, on May 4, 1815 he celebrated solemnly there Holiday of the ascension together with 16 cardinals, and still celebrated Pentecost there on May 14. ^[3]

Nineteenth -century restorations, war damage, new works [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

The neoclassical facade, which is characterized by the two bell towers and above all by the grandiose pronaos with six Ionian -style columns, was carried out in 1867 and is the result of the projects drawn up by Carlo Barabino in 1834 and reworked by Giovanni Battista Resco in 1841.
For the new laws of suppression issued by the Sabaudo government in 1861 the Franciscans had to leave the church and the convent again. In 1898 the church was erected in the parish by Archbishop Tommaso Reggio, entrusting it again to the Friars Minor who returned to us on May 30, 1901.

During the bombings that devastated the city during the Second World War, the Church was hit several times, but the greatest damage occurred above all on October 29, 1943. Many frescoes from the side chapels on the side towards via Polleri (south-east side) They went destroyed, including several of Domenico Fiasella; These lost parts are identified by the traits of raw plaster left such in the reconstruction. ^[4] Under the bombs, however, the backstare structure, the pillars remained, and some filling walls and some volars were collapsing. The photographic documentation reported in the municipal magazine “Genoa” of the year 1942 shows the square section structure of golden grouting that covers the completely tightened pillars, and inside the medieval columns emerge in white and black rocchi.

In 1995 the painter Raimondo Sirotti painted a “meeting of Saints Gioacchino and Anna”; Reinterpretation of the original apsidal painting, the work of the seventeenth -century painter Giulio Benso.

The interior, large and bright, restored after the serious damage of the Second World War, with three naves, has a Latin cross plan with a series of chapels in the side naves, enriched with frescoes, paintings, inlaid marbles and stucco in Zecchino gold, Works of the best Genoese artists of the seventeenth century

The famous philosopher and encyclopedist Montesquieu, in the first half of the eighteenth century, defined the nunciata the most beautiful church of Genoa. ^[5]

Main artists represented (XVII-XVIII centuries) [ change | Modifica Wikitesto ]

Giovanni Andrea Ansaldo – Gioacchino Asreto – Giulio Benso – Luca Cambiaso – Giovanni Battista Paggi – Domenico Piola – Domenico Scoticone (for polychrome and carved marbles) – Giacomo Porta (for polychrome and carved marbles) – Giovanni Battista Carlone and his brother Giovanni Carlone – Gregorio De Ferrari – Andrea Seminino – Giovanni Andrea De Ferrari – Il Guercino – Pietro Paolo Raggi – Luciano Borzone – Aurelio Lomi – Giovan Battista near – Nicolò Carlone – Fiasella – Vittorio Gatto – Octave Pellè (French) – Bernardo Carbone – Sebastiano Galeotti – Giulio Cesare Procaccini – Anton Maria Piola – Bernardo Strozzi – Calvi – Giovanni Andrea Carlone – Tommaso Clerici – Tommaso Orsolino (sculptor) – Leonardo Ferrandino (sculptor) – Simone Barabino.