The Cappella Sistina of Savona is one of the great secrets of Italian art: a late fifteenth-century funerary chapel built by Giuliano della Rovere — the future Pope Julius II — as a mausoleum for his parents and uncle Pope Sixtus IV (the pope who lent his name to both this chapel and the Vatican one). The decorative programme was entrusted to Flemish artists, creating an extraordinary hybrid of Italian Renaissance architecture and northern European painting.
The chapel stands adjacent to the cathedral on Piazza del Duomo. The interior decoration, executed around 1480–90, includes a cycle of paintings by Ludovico Brea, a Ligurian artist trained in the Flemish manner, and tapestries woven in the Low Countries. The contrast between the Italianate architecture and the cool, precise Flemish painting style gives the space an unusual character quite unlike anything else in Liguria. Admission is modest and the chapel is rarely crowded.