Luca Cambiaso

Born Moneglia, Genoa, 18 Oct 1527; died Madrid, 6 Sept 1585.

Italian painter and draughtsman. He was the leading artist in Genoa in the 16th century and the founder of the Genoese school. His many grandiose decorative schemes in churches and palazzi established a tradition of historical fresco painting in Genoa. He was also famous for his poetic night scenes. Among his many drawings, some are unusual for their figures being reduced to geometric (often cubic) forms.

1. Training and early work, to 1550.

Luca’s father, Giovanni Cambiaso (1495–1579), although aware of the new style introduced to Genoa by Perino del Vaga at the Palazzo Doria (begun 1528), remained a limited and provincial painter. Yet he was important to the artistic development of his son, which was also determined by constant practice in drawing and by a study of the Genoese works of Perino del Vaga, Pordenone and Domenico Beccafumi, and of Giulio Romano’s Stoning of St Stephen (1530; Genoa, S Stefano). Luca probably visited Rome between 1547 and 1550, when he might have met Pellegrino Tibaldi and Daniele da Volterra; certainly Michelangelo’s work had a significant impact on his formation. He also learnt to model, which his father considered essential to an understanding of the technique of painting. At this stage of his career Luca was closely associated with his father and depended on him for commissions.

Soprani (1674), whose biography is based on an account by the Venetian painter Valerio Corte (1530–80), a close friend of Cambiaso’s, described his early style as ‘too bold and proud’ and ‘rich in invention’. Confident in his power as a draughtsman, Cambiaso indulged in bold foreshortenings and exaggerated gestures. The forms in his Resurrection (1547; Imperia, SS Giacomo e Filippo) are heavy and muscular, the poses mannered and dramatic. Such features are yet more marked in his early frescoes, notably in the Battle between Hercules and the Amazons and Apollo Shooting the Greeks with Arrows before Troy (dated 1545–7 by Rotondi and 1550 by Calì; Genoa, Prefettura), which were painted for the Palazzo Doria, and in the Last Judgement (1550; Chiavari, S Maria delle Grazie). An early altarpiece, the Adoration of the Magi (Turin, Gal. Sabauda), is distinguished by the elaborate poses and an unusually low viewpoint. Cambiaso clarified his style in many ebullient and energetic drawings in which a serpentine outline encloses rounded volumes with colossal figures and extravagant foreshortenings. His fresco technique was unusually spontaneous, allowing him to proceed from small drawings to full-size sketches executed on the walls without the aid of cartoons.

2. Artistic maturity, 1551–69.

After 1551 Cambiaso became established as an independent artist. In these years he was influenced by the architect Galeazzo Alessi, who encouraged him to moderate the excesses of his early style and to develop a ‘softer, and more harmonious’ manner (Soprani, ed. Ratti). This new phase opened with a fresco for the church of S Maria degli Angeli, Genoa, of the Beheading of St John the Baptist (1552; destr.), for which Cambiaso modified his usual practice and prepared a cartoon.

In the following years Cambiaso collaborated with Giovanni Battista Castello on a series of commissions for decorative fresco cycles (see Castello (i), (1)). Castello, a learned painter with a deep knowledge of Emilian art and of Raphael, was also a decorator and architect and introduced Cambiaso to a wider artistic culture. In the 1550s they worked together in the loggia of the piano nobile of a villa built by Alessi for Luca Giustiniani (now the Villa Giustiniani Cambiaso, Genoa), where Cambiaso’s Diana and Castello’s Apollo face each other from opposite lunettes. Around 1560 Cambiaso painted a series of frescoes in the Palazzo Imperiale in Campetto, Genoa. Here the fame of the artists’ collaboration led Vincenzo Imperiale to commission Cambiaso and Castello to work side by side on a ceiling fresco consisting of two scenes from the Life of Cleopatra (both destr. World War II). In this Cambiaso gave new importance to setting complex groups of figures in an elaborate and spacious architectural setting. Stylistically close to this work are the Resurrection (1559) and the Transfiguration (1561; both Genoa, S Bartolommeo), symmetrical and taut designs in which light and colour radiate from the central figure of Christ.

In the mid-1560s Cambiaso continued to work with Castello on the decoration of some of the most prestigious Genoese palazzi: before 1565 he painted the Rape of the Sabines (see fig. [not available online]1) on the ceiling of the salone in the Villa Cattaneo (now Villa Imperiale di Terralba); and shortly afterwards in the Palazzo Meridiana, where the stucco ornaments were designed by Castello in 1565, he painted another ceiling fresco, the Return of Ulysses. Both these narrative scenes have elaborate displays of figures set within grandiose classical architecture from a centralized perspective viewpoint; in the Return of Ulysses the symmetry is more marked, and the figures are less crowded.

Although by now his style had matured, Cambiaso remained open to new ideas. Above all he was influenced by Valerio Corte, who was not only a portrait painter but a distinguished collector who owned works by Titian, Paolo Veronese and Andrea del Sarto. The composition of St Benedict Enthroned between SS John the Baptist and Luke (1562; Genoa Cathedral) is indebted to Venetian painting, with a richer, more refined use of colour and more painterly surfaces. The Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist, Angels and God the Father (c. 1563; Genoa-Sampierdarena, S Maria della Cella) in which the sacred subject is treated in a naturalistic manner, almost as an idyll, is similarly indebted to Venetian painting, and to Correggio. Venetian influence is apparent, too, in the sensuous mythological paintings that Cambiaso was producing at this time, such as the openly erotic Venus and Adonis (c. 1562; Rome, Gal. Borghese), and even more so in another painting of this subject (Genoa, priv. co; see Suida, Manning and Suida, 1958, fig.), which was clearly influenced by Veronese.

In the mid-1560s Cambiaso began to use simplified cubic shapes in his drawings, possibly influenced by an encounter with similar drawings in the work of German artists (for example, Albrecht Dürer) or in illustrated theoretical treatises, such as Erhard Schön’s Underweissung Proportion (Nuremberg, 1538). The most famous of such drawings is Fighting Figures (Florence, Uffizi), in which the figures have the simplified forms of mannequins.

This formal simplification is also evident in the paintings. Cambiaso began to use more restrained gesture and expression and to organize his composition through clear and simple geometric shapes, as in the fresco of the Construction of the Warehouse at Trebizond (Genoa, Pal. Parodi). Similar concerns are apparent in his work for the Lercari Chapel in Genoa Cathedral, for which he produced frescoes (Marriage of the Virgin; Purification of the Virgin), probably painted after Castello’s departure for Spain in 1567, as well as canvases (Virgin and Child with SS John the Baptist and Lawrence for the high altar, now in the baptistery; Adoration of the Magi; Adoration of the Shepherds). He is also documented as having executed a marble statue of Prudence for the chapel. The paintings, highly concentrated and meditative in feeling, convey a new spiritual vision that Cambiaso developed further in the 1570s.

3. Late years in Genoa and Spain, 1570–85.

In these years Cambiaso had less interest in decorative fresco painting. His Celebration of the Synod (c. 1574; Genoa, Pal. Arcivescovile), painted for his friend Cipriano Pallavicino, Bishop of Genoa, is his only fresco of the 1570s and shows a monotonous series of figures in a rigidly symmetrical framework. A mythological work of this period, Venus Weeping over the Body of Adonis (c. 1570–75; Rome, Pal. Barberini), is no longer a joyous celebration of the senses, but a meditation on death. He was now more interested in religious painting and, increasingly, in a correct expression of theological ideas. His style became yet more simplified, each scene being reduced to its essential features to produce austere and meditative compositions in a limited chromatic range. He may have been aware of the movement for Catholic reform, which spread in Genoa before the Council of Trent, and was perhaps familiar with Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises (1521–35). His Pietà (c. 1572; Genoa, S Maria in Carignano) is a starkly simple narrative, showing the patron in meditation within the picture, as if to emphasize the role of painting as a spiritual aid.

In these years Cambiaso painted many devotional subjects for private collectors, many of them night scenes. These include the celebrated Madonna with a Candle (Genoa, Pal. Bianco), in which the light, as though itself the imagination, reveals the sacred characters as rustic, simple and close to the spectator. The same sense of immediacy characterizes the delicate Holy Family with Angels and Donor (Genoa, Mus. Accad. Ligustica B.A.). Cambiaso’s increasing concern with nocturnal settings also led him to concentrate on subject-matter drawn from the Passion: in Christ before Caiaphas (Genoa, Mus. Accad. Ligustica B.A.) he used thick brushstrokes to emphasize the fall of light on folds and profiles; Christ at the Column (Genoa, Pal. Bianco) and the Agony in the Garden (Portoria, Annunziata) are closely related in this respect; he also produced a series of drawings (1570–75; Florence, Uffizi). In his later paintings, such as the Deposition (1575–80; Genoa, Mus. Accad. Ligustica B.A.), the Pietà (1575–80; Genoa, Pal. Rosso) and Christ Bleeding from his Wounds (after 1580; Genoa Cathedral), he demonstrated an even greater concern with theological rectitude.

In September 1583 Cambiaso accepted an invitation to work for Philip II of Spain, the result of a test piece he had sent from Genoa in 1581—the Martyrdom of St Lawrence (Madrid, Escorial)—which had evidently convinced the King’s advisers that Cambiaso’s artistic taste coincided with their ruler’s. He was commissioned to decorate the church of S Lorenzo in the Hieronymite monastery of the Escorial in accordance with an erudite theological programme. The Gloria (1584) that he painted on the sacristy vault and modified to comply with suggestions from the court, is an icily rigid representation of the Trinity and the Church Triumphant, disconcerting to modern taste and, indeed, an interesting case of the total subjection of art to the dictates of ideology. He worked unceasingly in S Lorenzo, assisted by many others, including his son Orazio, Lazzaro Tavarone (a pupil from Genoa) and some of the artists who had already been working in Spain with Cambiaso’s former collaborator, Castello, notably the latter’s son, Fabrizio, and Nicolas Granello. By May 1584 he had completed four large canvases of St Anne, The Sermon of St John the Baptist, St Ursula and the Ten Thousand Virgins and the Archangel Michael (in situ). In the spring of 1585 most of the frescoes for the Capilla Mayor and the sacristy were finished. Their hasty execution and the involvement of many collaborators provides sufficient explanation for the many weak passages that make them disappointing examples of Cambiaso’s skill.

Lauro Magnani. "Cambiaso, Luca." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T013288 (accessed March 22, 2012).