Palazzo Costa

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The Palazzo Costa is a Baroque style palace located on Via Roma #80 in Piacenza, Region of Emilia Romagna, Italy. The Museo Ambientale displaying period art and artifacts is now hosted by part of the palace.

Baroque architecture building style of the Baroque era

Baroque architecture is the building style of the Baroque era, begun in late 16th-century Italy, that took the Roman vocabulary of Renaissance architecture and used it in a new rhetorical and theatrical fashion, often to express the triumph of the Catholic Church. It was characterized by new explorations of form, light and shadow, and dramatic intensity. Common features of Baroque architecture included gigantism of proportions; a large open central space where everyone could see the altar; twisting columns, theatrical effects, including light coming from a cupola above; dramatic interior effects created with bronze and gilding; clusters of sculpted angels and other figures high overhead; and an extensive use of trompe-l'oeil, also called "quadratura," with painted architectural details and figures on the walls and ceiling, to increase the dramatic and theatrical effect.

Piacenza Comune in Emilia-Romagna, Italy

Piacenza is a city and comune in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy, the capital of the eponymous province. The etymology is long-standing, tracing an origin from the Latin verb placēre, "to please." In French, and occasionally in English, it is called Plaisance. The name means a "pleasant abode", or as James Boswell reported some of the etymologists of his time to have translated it, "comely". This was a name "of good omen."

History

The palace was commissioned by the wealthy merchant and banking Costa family from Genoa. The architecture and the fresco decoration were designed in 1693 by Ferdinando Bibiena. Bibiena designed the palace's dramatic entry staircase, leading to a piano nobile which Bibiena painted quadratura and Giovanni Evangelista Draghi frescoed the Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne (1699).

Galli da Bibiena family family

The Galli-Bibiena family, or Galli da Bibiena, was a family of Italian artists of the 17th and 18th centuries, including:

Giovanni Evangelista Draghi (1654–1712) was an Italian painter of the late-Baroque or Rococo period. Luigi Lanzi erroneously refers to him as Giovanni Battista Draghi, who should not be confused with the composer of the same name.

The palace now hosts the Museo Ambientale and collects artworks, furniture, and artifacts of mainly the 17th and 18th-century, including works by Salvator Rosa. His Gaius Marius before the ruins of Carthage is on display. The museum also has paintings by Mario Nuzzi also known as Mario dei Fiori (floral still-lives); Sisto Badalocchio; Francesco Furini (Magdalen); Francesco Botti; Giovanni Giacomo Barbelli; Giovanni Maria delle Piane known as Il Mulinaretto , (Portrait of Philip V, King of Spain); School of Pannini (Vedute); Van Coomans (Baptism); Giacinto Gimignani (Alexander the Great accepts Surrender of Enemy King); Baciccio, (Magdalen); and Andrea Sacchi (St Romuald in Prayer). [1]

Salvator Rosa Italian painter and poet

Salvator Rosa was an Italian Baroque painter, poet, and printmaker, who was active in Naples, Rome, and Florence. As a painter, he is best known as "unorthodox and extravagant" as well as being a "perpetual rebel" and a proto-Romantic.

Gaius Marius Ancient Roman general and statesman

Gaius Marius was a Roman general and statesman. Victor of the Cimbric and Jugurthine wars, he held the office of consul an unprecedented seven times during his career. He was also noted for his important reforms of Roman armies. He was at the centre of a paradigmatic shift from the militia levies of the middle Republic to the professional soldiery of the late Republic; he also developed the pilum, a javelin designed to break on impact, and large-scale changes to the logistical structure of the Roman army.

Mario Nuzzi Italian painter

Mario Nuzzi, who went by the pseudonym, Mario de' Fiori was an Italian painter in the Baroque style. His paintings are all based around floral arrangements; hence the name Fiori (flowers).

In 1880, after the death of Count Giacomo Costa, the palace was inherited by his adopted son, Pietro Ceresa; he sold it to the Raguzzi, and in 1934, it was sold at auction to the Maggi family, who still owns a large part of the palace. However some of the main rooms in the piano nobile are maintained as a small museum property by the Fondazione Horak.

The facade has a central balcony and tympanum; the latter has a coat of arms of the Costa Family. The work has a sobriety that hints of Neoclassicism. The grand staircase entry has the statues of Aphrodite, Juno, Flora and Pomona in the niches. [2]

Neoclassical architecture is an architectural style produced by the neoclassical movement that began in the mid-18th century. In its purest form, it is a style principally derived from the architecture of classical antiquity, the Vitruvian principles, and the work of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio.

Other rooms have elaborate stucco and fresco decoration, as well as Rococo furnishings and artifacts, often gilded. [3]

Rococo 18th-century artistic movement and style

Rococo, less commonly roccoco, or "Late Baroque", is an exceptionally ornamental and theatrical style of decoration which combines asymmetry, scrolling curves, gilding, white and pastel colors, sculpted molding, and trompe l'oeil frescoes to create the illusions of surprise, motion and drama. It first appeared in France and Italy in the 1730s and spread to Central Europe in the 1750s and 1760s. It is often described as the final expression of the Baroque movement.

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References

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