CAMBIASO, LUCA. — Painter, born at Moneglia on 18 October 1527; in Genoa he soon received his first instruction from his father Giovanni, a good painter active in the first half of the sixteenth century. His formation was certainly influenced by the study of Perin del Vaga’s frescoes in the Doria palace and perhaps also by those of Pordenone in the same palace, the latter having long since been lost. He later became acquainted with the Lombard and Venetian artists; and he was a friend of Valerio Corte, a disciple of Titian, active in Genoa in 1550; in 1575 he was in Rome.
In 1583 he went to Spain with his son Orazio and Lazzaro Tavarone to paint at the Escorial; he died in Madrid in 1585.
A highly renowned fresco painter, he worked intensively in the palaces and churches of Genoa. He also painted altarpieces and pictures of sacred and profane subjects, now in Genoa and abroad, in museums and collections. Among the frescoes, those in the villa Imperiale and the Grimaldi palace in Genoa may be mentioned; among the paintings, the Madonna and Child with s. John the Baptist in the church of S. Maria dalla Cella at Sampierdarena; the Pietà in S. Maria di Carignano in Genoa; and the Holy Child sleeping in the collection of the municipal hospitals of that city. C. must be regarded as the initiator of that Genoese school of painting which subsequently achieved great prominence in the seventeenth century. A notable artist,
although eclectic, he imbues his images with great vitality; they are always firmly drawn, vivid and strong in colour, and marked by a refined and elegant decorative taste. In his paintings, even when they are at times contrived, one can always discern some felicitous moment when he succeeds in freeing himself from a certain debased Mannerism through the use of a loose, free brushstroke of great pictorial effectiveness. He influenced not only the Genoese fresco painters of his time, such as Tavarone, but above all, and even more profoundly, Ansaldo and the formation of Bernardo Strozzi himself.