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Scorza, Sinibaldo
(b Voltaggio, 16 July 1589; d Genoa, 5 April 1631). Italian painter, draughtsman and etcher. He was born into a wealthy aristocratic family, his father being the Conte Scorza di Voltaggio, and he received a literary and humanist education. His training as a painter began at home under the guidance of the painter Giovanni Battista Carosio. In 1604 he moved to Genoa and entered the workshop of Giovanni Battista Paggi, where he learnt to paint animals, flowers and landscapes. Paggi had a collection of prints, among which were engravings by Dürer; Scorza copied these in pen, thus mastering a precise, minute technique of line drawing, both in the rendering of chiaroscuro and in the definition of figures. An album of 400 drawings by Scorza in the Czartoryski collection (Kraków, N. Mus.) includes copies after Dürer and drawings of animals and scenes of city life, with little figures in streets and squares. Such drawings were clearly inspired by Flemish genre scenes, Scorza being the first Ligurian artist to respond to such paintings. At this time there were close commercial links between Genoa and Flanders, leading to the introduction of many Flemish genre scenes into Genoese collections. Moreover, during Scorza’s formative years some distinguished north European artists worked in Genoa: Frans Snyders arrived in Genoa in 1608 and his pupil Jan Roos I (1591–1638) in 1614; the brothers Cornelis de Wael and Lucas de Wael, painters and picture dealers, lived there for many years from 1610; and Pieter Boel and Goffredo Wals also worked there. These artists were specialists in the painting of landscapes, marine subjects, animals, flowers, fruit and bambocciate, which were popular with Genoese collectors. However, one of the drawings from the Czartoryski album, Woman and Child, is dated 1607, demonstrating that the artist’s interest in Flemish painting preceded the arrival of painters from northern Europe, and that his drawings and paintings were the first of their kind executed by a Genoese artist.
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