I Costaguta, i Ferrandino e i cantieri della scultura a Chiavari (1620-1631)

This essay examines the artistic patronage of the Costaguta family in Chiavari between the 1620s and the early 1630s, focusing on the sculptural commissions entrusted to the workshop of Giuseppe and Giovanni Battista Ferrandino. Having risen to prominence in Rome through banking, papal service, and close ties to the Borghese court, the Costaguta channelled part of their financial and social capital into a series of interventions in their native city. Although these undertakings did not form part of a fully coherent programme, they had a significant impact on Chiavari’s religious architecture and contributed to the circulation of up-to-date artistic models within the local context. Particular attention is devoted to the high altar of the sanctuary of Nostra Signora dell’Orto and to the family’s funerary monuments. The essay reconstructs their design and execution through contracts, drawings, and surviving works, investigating the relationship between patronal agency, workshop practice, and the transmission of Roman prototypes. The framing device surrounding the miraculous Marian image is traced to the altar of the Salus Populi Romani in the Pauline Chapel at Santa Maria Maggiore, probably known to the Ferrandino through printed reproductions rather than direct experience. Similar processes of mediated appropriation emerge in the funerary monuments, whose Roman references were adapted to a more conservative local sculptural language. The study thus highlights the selective assimilation of Roman models by Ligurian craftsmen, while demonstrating how these reinterpretations generated new and influential solutions within seventeenth-century devotional sculpture in eastern Liguria.