Date: 26-05-2002
Owning Institution: National Gallery, courtesy the city of Genoa
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: 17th Century        

There are only three weeks left to see “Baroque Painting in Genoa”, the National Gallery’s small but illuminating (and free) exhibition of seventeenth-century masterpieces on loan from Genoese churches, palaces and museums. The Cook, by Bernardo Strozzi, is one of the most intriguing. An ideal albeit somewhat spicy accompaniment to a traditional Sunday lunch, it is this week’s visual feast.

Genoa is not a very popular tourist destination, partly because of the monumentally ugly post-war flyover which blights much of the historic harbour and city centre; so the richness of its artistic heritage remains a fairly well kept secret. The first half of the seventeenth century, which coincided with the career of Bernardo Strozzi, was the golden age of the fledgling Genoese Republic. The city’s population almost doubled and its wealth multiplied too, thanks principally to thriving maritime trade. Several leading artists were drawn to Genoa by its newfound prosperity, including Caravaggio, Rubens and Van Dyck. Strozzi, by contrast, was born and bred in the city.

Despite its apparently mundane subject matter, The Cook is a sophisticated and cosmopolitan picture, which demonstrates Strozzi’s familiarity with the latest trends in art. The warm, reddish tonalities of the painting; the virtuoso handling of a plethora of differently feathered types of poultry; the boldly painted fire beneath the cooking-pot; the subtly managed reflections in the splendid silver ewer; the sensual, ruddy-cheeked figure of the cook herself – all these suggest a desire to emulate the impressively fluent style of Rubens, in particular. But there is nothing Rubensian about Strozzi’s subject matter, which was almost certainly inspired by the very different example of northern genre paintings. Scenes of cooks in their kitchens or drinkers gathered in taverns had been a stock-in-trade of Dutch and Flemish artists for decades, but had only just begun to make their way into the collections of travelling Genoese merchants and bankers.

The Cook’s first owner was a member of the powerful Brignole-Sale dynasty, who displayed the painting in the grand setting of the Palazzo Rosso (now a public museum, the building is still home to the picture). The palace interior was lavish, its ceilings painted with dizzying mythological scenes, its walls hung with tapestries and decorated with gilded stucco and ornately carved mirrors. Strozzi’s painting illusionistically projected a mere servant into this world of untold wealth and daunting splendour –a servant, moreover, confident enough to stare out at her rich and aristocratic admirers with unusual boldness, while a distinctly cheeky half-smile plays on her lips. She must have seemed an arrestingly incongruous presence.

The author of an eighteenth-century travel memoir who went to see the picture  was given to understand that it was a “scherzo”, a joke, which begs the question of just what the joke might have been. Part of the painting’s appeal seems to have been fairly straight-faced. Offering a glimpse of the world below stairs – a view, so to speak, into the engine-room of palace life - it suggests that even there signs of wealth and well-being are ubiquitous. The cook is evidently well nourished and she finds herself surrounded by the makings not of a meal, but of a feast. The cornucopia of poultry asserts the wealth and status of the Brignole-Sale household. But Strozzi’s painting, like the northern genre pictures which had also begun to appear in Italian private collections at the time, was also to be enjoyed in a more down-to-earth way. It played on a new interest, among connoisseurs and the wealthy, in how the other half lived: a prurient fascination with a sexily unfamiliar, working-class world. The young cook is also a coquette. She plucks the dead goose in her lap in a way that suggests she has her mind on other things.

Similar scenes of women preparing poultry in northern genre painting, which Strozzi must have known, are yet more explicitly sexual in their humour. The origin of the joke probably lies in a pun, the Flemish words for “pluck” and “fornicate” being almost the same. Different versions of the same gag are to be found in English, and also in Italian, where the word for a bird, “uccello”, was slang for “penis”. So although Strozzi’s picture is much more understated than its Flemish or Dutch predecessors, titillation was almost certainly part of its purpose.

The suspicion is strengthened by the fact that Bernardo Strozzi apparently got into hot water over some of his pictures for private patrons. He was a Capuchin friar as well as an artist, who had managed to get permission to work outside his order. In 1626 (which just happens to be the approximate date of the picture shown here) he was summoned before an Archbishop’s Tribunal to answer charges of having “dishonoured his habit with the works of his brush”. He denied the charges vehemently, and persuaded another painter to testify on his behalf. His friend said that Bernardo Strozzi could not even bear to paint the subject of Adam and Eve, on account of the nudity involved. He was a “pure and modest” man in every way. But a few years later, when Strozzi was arrested again on a similar charge, he escaped from jail and ran away to Venice. He never went back to Genoa again – recognising, presumably, that his goose had been well and truly cooked.