V 
GENOESE VILLAS 
G ENOA, one of the most splendour-loving cities 
in Italy, had almost always to import her 
splendour. In reading Soprani’s “ Lives of the 
Genoese Painters, Sculptors and Architects,” one is 
struck by the fact that, with few exceptions, these wor- 
thies were Genoese only in the sense of having placed 
their talents at the service of the merchant princes who 
reared the marble city above its glorious harbour. 
The strength of the race lay in other directions ; but, 
as is often the case with what may be called people of 
secondary artistic instincts, the Genoese pined for the 
beauty they could not create, and in the sixteenth cen- 
tury they called artists from all parts of Italy to embody 
their conceptions of magnificence. Two of the most 
famous of these, Fra Montorsoli and Pierin del Vaga, 
came from Florence, Galeazzo Alessi from Perugia, 
Giovanni Battista Gastello from Bergamo; and it is to 
the genius of these four men, sculptor, painter, architect, 
and stuccatore (and each more or less versed in the 
crafts of the others), that Genoa owes the greater part 
of her magnificence. 
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