Luca Cambiaso

He was a prolific draughtsman who sometimes reduced figures to geometric (even cubic) forms. He was familiarly known as Lucchetto da Genova.

Cambiaso was born in Moneglia, then part of the Republic of Genoa, the son of a painter named Giovanni Cambiaso. Cambiaso was precocious, and at the age of fifteen, he painted, along with his father, some subjects from Ovid's Metamorphoses on the facade of a house in Genoa. In 1544, at the age of seventeen, he was involved in the decoration of the Palazzo Doria, now the Prefettura, perhaps working with Marcantonio Calvi, a painter of his father's generation. He aided in the vault decoration of the church of San Matteo, in collaboration with Giovanni Battista Castello. His Resurrection and Transfiguration altarpieces for San Bartolomeo degli Armeni date from c. 1560. In 1563, he painted a Resurrection for San Giovanni Battista in Montalto Ligure. This was followed by frescoes for the Villa Imperiale at Genoa-Turalba (also called the Palazzo Imperiali Terralba) with a Rape of the Sabines (c. 1565) and the Palazzo Meridiana (formerly Grimaldi; also in 1565). In the Capella Lercari of the Duomo di San Lorenzo, Cambiaso frescoed a Presentation and Marriage of the Virgin in 1569, the remainder of the chapel by Castello. • Illustration — The Visitation In 1583, Cambiaso accepted an invitation from Philip II to complete for the Escorial a series of frescoes begun by Castello; and the 1911 Encyclopædia states the principal reason for travelling to Spain was that he hoped royal influence would gain favour with the Vatican for his marriage plans, but this failed. In the Escorial, he executed a Paradise on the vaulting of the church, with a multitude of figures. For this picture, he received 2,000 ducats, probably the largest sum that had, up to that time, ever been given for a single work. His paintings in Spain hew to a strict religious theme. His son Orazio Cambiaso became a painter. Other followers from Genoa include Giovanni Andrea Ansaldo, Simone Barabino, Giulio Benso, Battista and Bernardo Castello, Giovanni Battista Paggi, Francesco Spezzini, and Lazzaro Tavarone. • Illustration — Self-portrait of the painter who paints the portrait of his father Giovanni