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| Cesare Nebbia Apparition of St Michael Archangel on Mount Gargano (central panel) ca. 1592 ceiling fresco Musei Vaticani, Rome |
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| Cesare Nebbia Angels with Emblems of the Passion 1587-88 ceiling fresco Scala Sancta, Rome |
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| Cesare Nebbia Deposition 1582 oil on canvas Chiesa della Santissima Trinità , Viterbo |
"Cesare Nebbia was the favorite student and closest collaborator of Girolamo Muziano, from whom he learned a faculty for inventiveness, a refined sense of color, and a love for depicting landscape. In the 1560s Nebbia was engaged in all the big painting projects led by Muziano, from the Cathedrals in Orvieto and Loreto to the works of Gregory XIII at the Vatican. During the pontificate of Sixtus V (1585-90) Nebbia was the main figure in all the paintings commissioned by the Pope, coordinating and managing (together with the Modenese Giovanni Guerra) the decoration of all the new Papal works. After participating in the decoration of San Giovanni in Laterano (for the Holy Year 1600) Nebbia moved to Lombardy to the Borromean College of Pavia where Federico Borromeo commissioned the frescoes of The Life of San Carlo. In his last years the artist returned to his native Orvieto, where he executed the altarpiece for the Duomo in a by now old-fashioned and repetitive style."
"Compared with the second and third quarters of the sixteenth century, its last decades saw an immense extension of artistic activity. The change came about during the brief pontificate of Sixtus V (1585-90). It is well known that he transformed Rome more radically than any single pope before him. . . . To be sure, this was a new spirit; it was the spirit of the Catholic Restoration. But the artists at his disposal were often less than mediocre, and few of the works produced in those years can lay claim to distinction. After the Sack of Rome a proper Roman school had ceased to exist, and most of the artist working for Sixtus were either foreigners or took their cue from developments outside Rome. In spite of all these handicaps something like a 'style Sixtus V' developed, remaining in vogue throughout the pontificate of Clement VIII and even to a certain extent during that of Paul V. This style may be characterized as an academic ultima maniera, a manner which is not anti-Mannerist and revolutionary in the sense of the new art of Caravaggio and the Carracci, but tends toward dissolving Mannerist complexities without abandoning Mannerist formalism. It is often blunt and pedestrian, on occasions even gaudy and vulgar, though not infrequently relieved by a note of refined classicism."
– Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750, originally published in 1958, revised by Joseph Connors and Jennifer Montagu and reissued by Yale University Press in 1999
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| Cesare Nebbia Young Man grasping a Column ca. 1575 drawing Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Cesare Nebbia St Jerome in Spandrel with Two Putti (study for fresco) ca. 1587 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
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| Cesare Nebbia Seated Sibyl ca. 1579-82 drawing Harvard Art Museums |
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| Cesare Nebbia Seated Figure of Liberality before 1614 drawing Princeton University Art Museum |
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| attributed to Cesare Nebbia The Emperor Charlemagne (study for fresco) ca. 1572-82 drawing National Gallery of Canada |
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| Cesare Nebbia St John the Baptist and a Bishop Saint standing in Niches before 1614 drawing Harvard Art Museums |
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| Cesare Nebbia Back view of Striding Man in Long Cloak before 1614 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Cesare Nebbia Martyrdom of Two Saints before 1614 drawing Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Cesare Nebbia Martyrdom of St Stephen ca. 1575-1600 drawing Museo del Prado, Madrid |
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| Cesare Nebbia Assumption of the Virgin before 1614 drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Cesare Nebbia Assumption of the Virgin before 1614 drawing Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |