Maritime ex-votos and sea painters in Camogli: a comparison between images and interpretations of the sea

The seminar that here is intended to briefly review focuses on the pictorial representations previously belonged to ship owners and captains of Camogli, collected between 1829 and 1899 and currently exhibited in the local museum "Gio Bono Ferrari" and in the sanctuary of “Nostra Signora del Boschetto”.

The research conducted by Enrico Squarcina at the two locations has attempted to highlight similarities and differences of the artworks, considering the pictorial techniques, the historical-artistic frames and their own commissions and contents. In particular, the fieldwork considered only paintings of sailing boats exhibited and reproduced in the respective catalogs (55 paintings of the “Gio Bono Ferrari” museum and 61 paintings displayed in the sanctuary of “Nostra Signora del Boschetto”).

With concern to the museum, the artistic representations here exhibited belong to large families of ship-owners and captains of sailing ships, whose intent was to glorify their own properties and show off the prestige achieved through maritime trade.

On the contrary, the paintings exhibited at the sanctuary represent the votive expression of sailors, captains or entire crews who intend to pay homage to the divinity, the “Madonna del Boschetto”, due to the intercession that has allowed their salvation against inevitable misfortunes and disasters at sea.

What seems to emerge from the research is the substantial differentiation between the two exhibition contexts in terms of the artworks. They both are characterized by a plurality of pictorial styles and types of objects, which is on the one side a reflection of the social and the economic rank of the commissions and, on the other, of their meanings and aims.

The methodology adopted for the research accepted, on the one hand, quantitative sampling (selecting some recurring elements) and, for another, a qualitative analysis of historical sources and artworks. The combination of the two methods gives the possibility to frame the object of the research – sea paintings and ex-votos – inside of their economic, political and cultural backgrounds. In all of these cases, the background is represented by the maritime history of Camogli and, above all, the golden age that benefited its merchant ships in the second half of the nineteenth century.

In Squarcina’s research, three major events were pointed out and considered as the landmarks for the history of Camogli Navy. During the Napoleonic Wars, the merchant ships were able to arrange the supplying of food and bullets for the French troops. Secondly, in the 1830s a new opportunity for Camogli traders was represented by the military campaign conducted by the French in Algeria. Another chance to make a business establishing trade routes became then possible with the Crimean war (1853-1856), both to the east towards Asia and to the west towards the New World.

The contextualization of these events has been very useful to inform us about the maritime culture of the Camogli society and its protagonists: sailors, commanders, ship-owners who have chosen to involve specialized painters to represent their boats or narrate the nautical feats. The work of Squarcina has therefore attempted to synthesize the biographical paths of some of these painters as well as to show some elements of the representations.

With regard to the museum, the careful analysis of such representations has shed light on the types of sailing ships taken into account, underlining the efficiency of the merchant services that the ship-owners intended to point out and relegating to sporadic and marginal extras the human presence. The votive offerings of the sanctuary (plaques, photographs, artifacts of various kinds and scale) propose instead a double scheme concerning the offering practices. On the one side, they are intended for thanksgiving and, on the other, their aim may be the one of dissolving a promise made with the divine figure that people worshipped.

To conclude, from this work on pictorial representations and marine votive objects a whole series of elements - partly mentioned with anecdotes or deliberately left in the background – seems to emerge and to inform us about superstitions, economic interests, social prestige and the life on board of the social actors. Moreover, the attention paid on such meanings turn out to be very emblematic of the deep bond of the Camogli community with the sea and how such a bond is artistically represented. The diversity of purposes and styles of the artworks nevertheless reveal that the focus posed on them was about the sea. To put it in Squarcina’s words, the sea represents “on one side a source of wealth and social pride, on the other of danger and revelation of human littleness towards natural phenomena and adverse fortune”.