Alongside Giovanni Battista Paggi, Bernardo Castello was Luca Cambiaso’s main artistic inheritor in Genoa. Following the elder artist’s departure for Madrid in 1583, Castello and Paggi assumed the roles as the principal painters of their native city. While Paggi spent several years outside of Genoa—seeking refuge in Florence after murdering a patron who had refused to pay for one of his works—Castello was comparatively well-traveled in Italy and absorbed the influence of the works he encountered. He spent significant periods in Rome and Florence particularly, where he became a member of the Accademia del Disegno in 1588, and his style has been described as a skillful amalgamation of 16th-century Venetian, Tuscan, Roman, and Genoese traditions.

Castello had an interest in literature and counted several prominent poets and literary figures among his friends, including Gabriello Chiabrera, Giambattista Marino, Angelo Grillo, and Torquato Tasso. Castello provided drawings for Tasso’s seminal work, Gerusalemme liberata, which was published in Genoa in 1590 with engravings after his designs. The artist frequently turned to his learned friends for advice on developing iconographic programs, and his works often employed humanistic and particularly mythological subjects as a means to celebrate Genoa and its noble families. This is almost certainly the case in the present work, in which Neptune is posed standing atop on a shell-shaped chariot drawn by sea-horses. He holds aloft his trident while reaching toward an armored figure standing on land, handing him a crown. Neptune is surrounded by sea nymphs playing music, while in the background, two large ships sail through calm waters, in a probable reference to the Genoese prowess as sailors. In the foreground, two recumbent figures frame the scene. One holds a cornucopia while the other holds a jug overflowing with water—both traditional attributes of Roman river gods, but in this case possibly allegories of water.

In this drawing, Castello adapts a composition developed by Guido Reni in a painting that he produced for the Barberini family, known today through an engraving by Johann Friedrich Greuter published in Giovanni Battista Ferrari’s De Florum Cultura (Fig. 1). In this work, an allegory of the Americas is depicted gifting seeds to Neptune—seeds with which the flowers of the Barberini gardens would be planted. The original painting is evidently no longer extant, but Castello possibly encountered it in Rome during his sojourn there. Here he has expanded the image and reworked the iconography. While similar representations such as Neptune handing the crown to Athens, to Britannia, or Alexander the Great are known, the presence of ships in the background and the additional allegorical figures on land suggest that the soldier receiving the crown is an allegorical representation of Genoa.

We are grateful to Jonathan Bober for confirming Bernardo Castello’s authorship of this drawing (written communication, 18 January 2022).