Margherita Nugent (1891-1954): lo sguardo di un’intenditrice d’arte sulla pittura genovese del Seicento e del Settecento

The discovery of Genoese painting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has many ancestors and it also goes through the history of exhibitions and through those who cherished to visit them. The case of the attention given to this topic by the countess of Irsina, Margherita Riario-Sforza-Nu- gent, an eclectic collector who also visited Genoa, but, above all, a frequent attendee of exhibitions in Italy and abroad, is another interesting building block, not so considered in historiography up to today. In particular, her uncommon skill to read artworks - thanks to the connections she often ma- naged to grasp them easily in comparison to the places she visited (e.g. in the Genoese case, the Red, White and Granello Palaces) - achieved unexpected results in her notes, dedicated to the pe- rhaps most iconic painting of the Ligurian baroque, Reception in a Garden by Alessandro Magna- sco, and defined by the noblewoman as an «open-air salon», certainly among the most frequent art-work in the blockbuster exhibitions of the Twenties.