Excerpted from Davis, Bruce. Master Drawings in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997, 21.
Cambiaso is generally considered the founding father of the Genoese school of painting and its first distinctive personality. He studied the frescoes of Perino del Vaga in the Palazzo Doria in Genoa and Michelangelo’s and Raphael’s in Rome. Along with Giovanni Battista Castello, called Il Bergamesco, Cambiaso helped establish the tradition of decorative frescoes in Genoese churches and palaces. He was a prolific and highly influential draftsman, thus his drawings are frequently confused with those of his school and followers.
This vibrant and highly fluid sketch was made by Cambiaso in preparation for his early fresco Hercules Fighting the Amazons of 1544 in the Palazzo della Prefettura (formerly Palazzo Antonio Doria, later Spinola) in Genoa, executed when the artist was only seventeen.1 There are two other drawings for the figure of Hercules, one in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh,2 and one formerly in the Wessner collection in Saint Gall, Switzerland.3
Notes
1. Bertina Suida Manning and William Suida, Luca Cambiaso, la vita e le opere (Milan: Casa Editrice Ceschina, 1958), 75, fig. 2.
2. Keith Andrews, National Gallery of Scotland: Catalogue of Italian Drawings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 1: 26, no. rsa 166; 2: fig. 201.
3. Suida Manning and Suida, Cambiaso, 193, fig. 10. Another drawing by Cambiaso of Hercules, though unrelated to the figure in the Los Angeles sheet but very similar in conception and draftsmanship, was formerly in the collection of Michel Gaud. See his sale, Sotheby’s, Monaco, 20 June 1987, lot 85.
