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| Luca Cambiaso Virgin and Child with Donor and Angels in Lunette (upper section of altarpiece with St Erasmus, St Roch and St Sebastian) 1550 oil on canvas Chiesa di Santa Maria della Castagna, Genoa |
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| Luca Cambiaso St Erasmus, St Roch and St Sebastian 1550 oil on canvas Chiesa di Santa Maria della Castagna, Genoa |
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| Luca Cambiaso Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist ca. 1550 oil on panel Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas |
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| Luca Cambiaso Venus and Cupid on Seashells ca. 1560-65 oil on canvas Galleria Borghese, Rome |
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| Luca Cambiaso Rest on the Flight into Egypt ca. 1564-65 oil on canvas Accademia Ligustica di Belle Arti, Genoa |
"More rapidly than in his decorations, in his easel pictures Luca veered away from the obvious apparatus of Maniera. The change is now observable to us mainly in religious works, but it is by no means confined to them alone. By 1570 most of his religious pictures had assumed an explicit Counter-Reformation content, simply illustrating an obvious and sober popular piety, and the form and the descriptive mode devised to suit this content is a paradigm of Counter-Maniera. The potential to make such a style may have been part of Luca's aesthetic disposition since his beginnings; he had moved towards it even in the 1550s, apparently more in consequence of aesthetic than religious attitudes; but in the course of the seventh decade the latter came to be the determining factor. Until his departure for Spain in 1583 (where he preceded Federico Zuccaro and Tibaldi as chief painter in the Escorial) a large part of Luca's production consisted in the manufacture of simplistic works of arte sacra, almost perfectly exemplifying the conjunction only this genre could call for of naturalism adequate to inspire belief, abstractness and extreme legibility. The degree of banality to which Luca aspires – so wholly antithetic to his earlier Maniera search for ingenuity of conceit – is, at least throughout most of the seventies, apparently in the painter's wholly self-aware control. Some of the altarpieces, destined for the use of public piety, attain the dubious but still noteworthy character of anti-art. But smaller devotional paintings, using a moderated version of the same vocabulary, still make witticisms and astonishments with play of the abstracting forms and evoke fine, oblique emotions, of a Maniera cast, from the persons and situations they illustrate. With another slightest shift in handling, antique subjects, some of them quasi-erotica, recover still more of the aspect and effects of the Maniera. Yet the basic formal matter Luca employs is, in all these cases, close to interchangeable, demonstrating perhaps more efficiently than in any of Luca's contemporaries what the relationship between Maniera and its counterpart style is."
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| Luca Cambiaso Venus and Cupid 1570 oil on canvas Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Luca Cambiaso Birth of the Virgin ca. 1570 oil on canvas Mauritshuis, The Hague |
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| Luca Cambiaso Esther before Ahasuerus ca. 1565-70 oil on canvas Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas |
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| Luca Cambiaso Pietà ca. 1571 oil on canvas Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta, Genoa |
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| Luca Cambiaso St Jerome ca. 1560-80 oil on canvas Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro |
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| Luca Cambiaso Penitent Magdalen ca. 1570-80 oil on canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
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| Luca Cambiaso Madonna of the Candle ca. 1570-75 oil on canvas Musei di Strada Nuova, Genoa |
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| Luca Cambiaso Holy Family with St John the Baptist ca. 1578 oil on canvas Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney |
"Differently but not much less than the Maniera, the Counter-Maniera is an artificial style and almost as arbitrary. Nevertheless, it is one of the elements in Counter-Maniera's difference from Maniera that, just as it pretends to classicizing rationale (but achieves no more than classicist formulae for it), so also it pretends to naturalism. But to a still essentially Mannerist mentality, as Luca's Counter-Maniera mind still is, naturalism means either an un-fancy kind of narrative or psychological datum that can be illustrated (not necessarily, therefore, an effect of visual mimesis) or an aspect of visual experience that can be turned to use as a concetto. The first of these 'naturalisms' inclines Luca towards frequent and genuinely captivating incidents of genre-like intimacy, usually in smaller works; the second leads him to combine these with the theme of the nocturne. In both respects, and more especially the latter, his tendencies coincide with those of the Cremonese Campi, Antonio in particular. Antonio and Luca are so close in the time of their first essays in notturni that we cannot surely assign precedence to either, nor assess the possible direction of an influence between them. Luca's notturni may well have been an an independent and coincidental growth, with one of its sources in a singular facet of the Genoese art of Perino. In any case, it is Luca who is by far the more frequent worker in the nocturnal genre, more subtle and capricious in his exploitation of its possibilities, and far more poetic in the effects he achieves in it of visual as well as psychological sensation. Antonio Campi's nocturnes had some role in the formation of the seeing of Caravaggio, who turned them to account in his new search for reality. It may be significant for the qualities of Mannerism that persist more evidently in Luca's nocturnes that, by a route still unexplained, he seems to have been a source for Georges de La Tour, whose nocturnes so poetically transcend reality."
– quoted passages by S.J. Freedberg from Painting in Italy - 1500 to 1600 in the Pelican History of Art series (London, 1971)
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| Luca Cambiaso Holy Family with St John the Baptist before 1585 oil on canvas Museo del Prado, Madrid |
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| attributed to Luca Cambiaso Death of Lucretia before 1585 oil on canvas Museo del Prado, Madrid |