The story
In 1941 Rubens's great equestrian portrait of Giovan Carlo Doria, a young Genoese nobleman, left Italy as a gift from Mussolini to Hitler, destined for the museum Hitler planned in Linz. Rubens had painted it in Genoa in 1606, when Doria received the Spanish Order of Santiago. The canvas came back to Italy in 1948, was shown in Florence and Naples, and finally returned to Genoa in 1988, to this palace.
The house itself is much of the visit. The nobleman Francesco Grimaldi built it in the 1590s over medieval foundations, and by 1599 it was on the Rolli, the official list of Genoese houses fit to lodge visiting dignitaries. The collector Ansaldo Pallavicino bought it in 1650, and his paintings, silver and furniture are still in the rooms. In the 1730s Maddalena Doria and her husband Nicolò Spinola gave it a Rococo makeover, with a gallery of mirrors brought from Paris.
In 1958 the brothers Franco and Paolo Spinola, who had no heirs, gave the palace and everything in it to the Italian state. The noble floors keep the look of a lived-in house, with pictures hung among the family furniture. The upper floors, wrecked in the Second World War, reopened in 1992 as the National Gallery of Liguria, where Antonello da Messina's small Ecce Homo and Giovanni Pisano's marble figure of Justice share the rooms with the Rubens.
