CAMBIASO, Luca. — Painter, born in Moneglia on 18 Oct. 1527, he soon received his first instruction in Genoa from his father Giovanni, a good painter who worked in the first half of the sixteenth century. To his formation he certainly owed much to the study of the frescoes by Perin del Vaga in the Doria palace and perhaps also to those by Pordenone in the same palace, the latter long since lost. He then became acquainted with the Lombard and Venetian schools and was a friend of Valerio Corte, a pupil 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 fresco painter of great renown, he worked intensively in the palaces and churches of Genoa. He also painted altarpieces and pictures of sacred and profane subjects, some of which are today in Genoa and others abroad, in museums and private collections. Among his frescoes may be cited those in the Villa Imperiale and the Grimaldi palace in Genoa; among his paintings, the *Madonna and Child with St John the Baptist* in the church of S. Maria della Cella at Sampierdarena; the *Pietà* in S. Maria di Carignano in Genoa; and the *Sleeping Holy Child* in the collection of the Civic Hospitals of that city. Cambiaso must be considered the initiator of that Genoese school of painting which later flourished so greatly in the seventeenth century. A notable artist,
though eclectic, he infused great vitality into his images, always firmly drawn, vivid and strong in colour and refined in an elegant decorative taste. In his paintings, even when sometimes contrived, one always senses a happy moment when he succeeds in freeing himself from certain debased mannerisms through the use of a loose, free brushstroke of great pictorial efficacy. His influence extended not only to the Genoese fresco painters of his time, such as Tavarone, but above all, and even more, to Ansidei and to the formation of Bernardo Strozzi himself.