A year after his birth, Genoa, the city near to which he was born, underwent a drastic political change. Breaking established ties with France, it began an alliance with Emperor Charles V and came under the rule of a presiding oligarchy, lead by the famous Admiral, Andrea Doria. Eminent Genoese families began to compete for supremacy and one of the means of so-doing was to build fabulous palaces, the decorations of which were commissioned from the most esteemed painters of the period: Perino del Vaga, Domenico Beccafumi and Giovanni Antonio da Pordenone. Working initially under his father, Giovanni, Luca Cambiaso emerged into a climate of high artistic achievement. One of his first employments, in the late 1540s, was to assist his father in painting the ceilings of the palace of Antonio Doria. By 1550 Cambiaso seems to have been ready to branch out on his own and in 1551 he was elected as Console dell’arte, a post which appears to have been used to acknowledge new and exciting talents.1 By that time, Giovanni Battista Castello, who had spent nearly ten years in Rome, was the pre-eminent architect and painter in Genoa and through him, Cambiaso received an increased awareness of the artistic developments promulgated by Raphael and by his follower, Perino del Vaga. Having established a highly successful career in Genoa, the period of his maturity seems to have been unsettled by the fact of his falling in love with his sister-in-law. His own wife died but Cambiaso was unsuccessful in gaining papal dispensation to re-marry as he wished. In 1583 he was invited to Madrid by Philip II to complete the series of frescoes in the Escorial palace begun by Giovanni Battista Castello and he died there only two years later.
This drawing for a figure seated in a niche was made in preparation for the ceiling decorations of the grand salone of the Palazzo Lercari Parodi, in Genoa. Cambiaso probably received this commission soon after 1570 and the theme was the glorification of the Lercari family. A central fresco depicts the event following the 14th century heroics of Megollo Lercari, who by defending his name against the insults of a courtier of the Emperor of Trebizond, acted with such fairness and bravery, that the Emperor himself rewarded Lercari by granting the Genoese people a safe refuge and warehouse in his city. The fresco shows Lercari being shown the construction site by the Emperor and around this, in the curved space leading up to the painting are portraits of the Lercari noblemen, depicted seated, as here, in niches, with cartouches giving their names beneath each one. With his sword and armour and the helmet beside him, this drawing can be identified as Relmusto Lercari.
Bertina Suida Manning and William Suida publish photographs of the fresco and some of the Lercari heroes, as well as illustrating a drawing in the Uffizi (inv.13729), catalogued as autograph, but weak by comparison with the present work. A third sheet, again almost identical to this and to the Uffizi drawing, is in the Prado, Madrid (inv.DO1932) catalogued as follower of Cambiaso and again, clearly weaker than this. Between the present study and the final frescoed figures, Cambiaso made certain changes. The angle of the fresco Relmusto Lercari is very slightly more da sotto in su and the design of the niche is more ample and circular in the final work, shaped more as a hollowed out cartouche than as a pendentive.
A rather schematic drawing of the whole composition of the central fresco was formerly in the Manning collection and an interesting comparison may be made with a drawing of a Roman General standing in a Niche, in the Louvre which, it has been recently suggested, was made by Cambiaso in preparation for further frescoed figures in the room adjoining the main Salone of the Palazzo Lercari-Parodi2.
1. See Suida Manning and Manning, Luca Cambiaso, Milan 1958, p.90, pl.CLXXVII, fig.286 and see also, figs. 183, 280 and 279.
2. See, Federica Mancini, Luca Cambiaso, exhibition catalogue, Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2010, cat. no. 30.
