Seventeenth-century Genoa was a fabulously wealthy cosmopolitan municipality with a rich and diverse artistic tradition. Nourished by a range of commercial links with other European cities, its rulers and citizens built sumptuous palaces and churches on the strength of the wealth generated by the Genoese bankers who came to dominate international finance. From about 1600 to the early eighteenth century the large patrician class, composed of wealthy and educated patrons, vied with one another to commission the most beautiful and lavish altarpieces, paintings, and sculpture.This book, the first in English to investigate Baroque painting from Genoa, features the work of both native-born artists such as Bernado Strozzi and Valerio Castello, and those influential outside painters, including Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyck, who lived and worked in the city.