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| Luca Cambiaso Scenes of Antique History and Myth Apollo assisting the Trojans to slay the Greeks (detail) 1544 ceiling fresco Palazzo Doria-Spinola, Genoa |
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| Luca Cambiaso Scenes of Antique History and Myth 1544 ceiling fresco Palazzo Doria-Spinola, Genoa |
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| Luca Cambiaso Scenes of Antique History and Myth 1544 ceiling fresco Palazzo Doria-Spinola, Genoa |
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| Luca Cambiaso Scenes of Antique History and Myth 1544 ceiling fresco Palazzo Doria-Spinola, Genoa |
"Of all the painters of the sixteenth-century school of Genoa only one ascends to an importance that is more than local: Luca Cambiaso (1527-85). Only he among the painters of the North Italian centres may lay claim to rival the genius of Pellegrino Tibaldi (his exact contemporary), whom he resembles not only in the dimension of his gifts but in their kind. Even the course of evolution of their styles is somewhat similar, though Luca's creative energy in painting seems, by comparison, unquenchable. Luca was the son of Giovanni Cambiaso (ca. 1495-ca. 1579), a painter of the elder Calvi's generation, to whose instruction Luca could not have been much obliged. He learned, instead, from almost every importation he could find in Genoa, from Perino chiefly, but, almost equally important, from Pordenone and from Giulio Romano also. Further, there is the likelihood that just before the time of his first extant work, a fresco decoration of important scale [details above] in the Doria palace that is now the Prefettura (1544), he had been through Lombardy, and perhaps even visited Rome."
"In 1544 Luca was seventeen, and in the Prefettura decoration (scenes of antique history and myth) his precocity, phenomenal as it is, is not so astonishing as his explosive élan of form and idea, or the sense of individuality of style with which he invests what he has learned. It seems to be by synthesis of Perino's Genoese Maniera and Pordenone's plastic style, more than by any needful reference to Roman art, that Luca conceived this style. However, the pressures under which he fused these main components produced a result of extreme modernity. In its large forms it extends the mode of Pordenone (classicized to reconcile it with Perino) into an abstractness and a play upon illusionist conceit that are more according to the intellectual disposition of Maniera, yet almost aggressively devoid of grace; conversely, the mode employed in the smaller scenes is an extension of the ornamental style of Perino, closely analogous to what the avant-garde of high Maniera evolved in contemporary Rome. The violence of statement of these frescoes soon subsided, as did the extremism of their geometry of large form."
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| Luca Cambiaso Miracle of the Ethiopian Dragons before 1559 fresco Chiesa di San Matteo, Genoa |
"From the mid century onward Luca began to moderate his large-scale mode with effects taken into it from his maniera piccola, and within the course of a decade the result was an approximate consistency of recognizable Maniera. The vault decoration of the Doria church of S. Matteo [directly above] (before 1559, in collaboration with Il Bergamasco) is an indication of the thoroughness with which Luca could assimilate Maniera graces and sophistications, but yet not wholly sublimate his taste for arbitrary geometric form."
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| Luca Cambiaso Abduction of the Sabine Women Groups of Warriors in a Landscape (detail) ca. 1565 ceiling fresco Villa Imperiale di Terralba, Genoa |
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| Luca Cambiaso Abduction of the Sabine Women Warrior and Woman in a Landscape (detail) ca. 1565 ceiling fresco Villa Imperiale di Terralba, Genoa |
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| Luca Cambiaso Abduction of the Sabine Women Female Allegorical Figures (border detail) ca. 1565 ceiling fresco Villa Imperiale di Terralba, Genoa |
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| Luca Cambiaso Abduction of the Sabine Women Female Allegorical Figures (border detail) ca. 1565 ceiling fresco Villa Imperiale di Terralba, Genoa |
"The middle sixties were the time of Luca's finest efforts as a frescante, conspicuously in the Villa Imperiale at Genoa-Terralba [above] and in the Palazzo Meridiana [below]. In both schemes, in the former especially, the academicizing of Maniera is a process that has been turned to positive much more than negative effect. Luca's geometric tendency of mind has been applied to the manipulation of volumes and spaces in a way which, while basically that of the Maniera conceit, endows the concetto with the force of a high formal rhetoric. Nowhere else is the notion of the decorator's quadro riportato so ingeniously made the matter of illusionistic paradox."
– 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 Ulysses slaying the Suitors of Penelope Central panel (detail) 1565 ceiling fresco Palazzo della Meridiana, Genoa |
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| Luca Cambiaso Ulysses slaying the Suitors of Penelope Figure of Commander (border detail) 1565 ceiling fresco Palazzo della Meridiana, Genoa |
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| Luca Cambiaso Ulysses slaying the Suitors of Penelope Figure of Warrior (border detail) 1565 ceiling fresco Palazzo della Meridiana, Genoa |
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| Luca Cambiaso Ulysses slaying the Suitors of Penelope Figure of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (border detail) 1565 ceiling fresco Palazzo della Meridiana, Genoa |
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| Luca Cambiaso Construction of the Warehouse of the Genoese in Trebizond ca. 1571 ceiling fresco Palazzo Lercari-Parodi, Genoa |
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| Luca Cambiaso Construction of the Warehouse of the Genoese in Trebizond Seated Figures (border detail) ca. 1571 ceiling fresco Palazzo Lercari-Parodi, Genoa |