Virgin of the Immaculate Conception

The Frenchman Pierre Puget made an impact on Genoese sculpture comparable to Bernini’s in Rome. Through his work under Cortona and sporadic visits to Rome in the 1640s and early 1660s, he had an enviable training and was seized upon by the Genoese nobility as an artist who could provide a new impetus for a moribund local school. These expectations were amply fulfilled by his Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, which was designed as the focal point of the centrally planned church of the Immaculate Conception of Mary in Genoa, situated in a charitable foundation for the poor. The theme was a Baroque subject par excellence, reinforcing the Catholic belief in Mary’s freedom from the stain of the original sin. The tableau is highly pictorial in conception and suggests that he had an entr�e into the workshops of Ferrata and Cafà during his time in Rome. The Virgin here displays an expansive, upturned gesture, she stands on the crescent moon and clouds which were her attributes as the Immaculata. Beneath her is a marble arch composed of cherubim and angels, one of whom holds a mirror, the other palm leaves, for the Virgin was the mirror of justice and queen of martyrs. The whole achieves a Berninesque contrast between weightlessness in the soaring figure of the Virgin and the solid medium of stone.

Puget’s capacity to translate such a painterly composition into marble was often imitated but never bettered; his altarpiece of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception was copied by Genoese sculptors and painters alike.