BENSO, Giulio - b. 1592 Pieve di Teco, d. 1668 Pieve di Teco

Italian painter and draughtsman. Around 1605 he came to Genoa, where he presented himself to a leading patron of the arts, Gian Carlo Doria, who gave him lodging and recommended him to Giovanni Battista Paggi (1554-1627), in whose influential studio he trained. Students were required first to copy sketches, then paintings and reliefs and, finally, to draw from nature. Benso made many copies after a variety of source material, among them the Sacrifice of Abraham (Florence, Uffizi) after Luca Cambiaso and the Joseph Sold into Slavery (Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett) after Raphael. While still with Paggi, Benso produced ‘bizarre sketches of great number and variety, as he had a fertile mind along with a lively and vigorous imagination’. In order to learn perspective he constructed architectural models, which were greatly admired; they enabled him to achieve formidable feats of aerial perspective in his paintings, in which figures and ornament are boldly foreshortened.

Apart from his work in Liguria, he decorated the Palazzo Grimaldi in Cagnes-sur-Mer with the Fall of Phaethon and sent works to the Abbey of Weingarten in Germany. In the 1630s, he completed his masterpiece, a fresco in the presbytery and apse of the church of the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata del Vastato. There are also paintings of his in his hometown of Pieve di Teco as well as in the parish church of Sant’Ambrogio in Alassio.

Choir vault and apse decoration

The picture shows the choir vault and apse with illusionistic architecture and scenes from the life of the Virgin (Annunciation, Assumption).

The most important setting for the fictive dissolution of ceilings and walls with painting intended to evoke and illustrate heavenly sphere was the church, with its choir tribunes, inner fa�ades, vaults and cupolas. The new type of the hall church evolved following the prototype of the Il Gesù in Rome, and offered fresco painters an ideal space to work in. The vaulted, single-aisle nave flanked by chapels, transepts flooded by light from the centre cupola, and a spacious choir made possible a sophisticated structuring of the pictorial program in conformity with the architecture.

The painterly redecoration of the church of Santissima Annunziata del Vastato in Genoa following its modernization in the style of the Counter-Reformation began around 1625 with the vaults of the aisles. The painting of the choir by Giulio Benso began in 1635, and there are staged the most important events of the life of the Virgin as a theatrical spectacle. The Annunciation to the Virgin, central to the church’s iconography, takes place in the vault, shifted to heavenly spheres with the help of quadratura. The drama of the Annunciation - Mary receives the angel’s message in an airy loggia, while God floats down in glory above her - is then outdone by the ecstasy of the choir calotte’s Assumption.

This theatrical staging is considered one of the most successful combinations, with respect to foreshortening of quadratura and figural painting with the actual architecture.