Two animated figures gesticulating

The most admired aspect of Luca Cambiaso’s draftsmanship, and arguably of his overall artistic production, is the geometric approach to the representation of the human figure evident in the present sheet. It was in the drawings Cambiaso produced around 1565 for two important decorations in Genoa, the Villa Cattaneo-Imperiale and the Palazzo Grimaldi on the Strada Nuova, that he reached an innovative level of schematization and geometrical abstraction (see L. Magnani, Luca Cambiaso da Genova al Escorial, Genoa, 1995, pp. 163-185). In this drawing the figures are rendered as abstract mannequins, their clothing is reduced to a minimum, the details abbreviated, the facial expressions eliminated together with all unnecessary ornamentation, and the anatomies are reduced to cubic modules. Yet, even when using this ‘cubist manner’ Cambiaso animates his figures with an energetic sense of movement.

Luca Cambiaso was the only artist of the period who embraced the geometric style literally in his drawings. It is possible that the present sheet was originally part of a larger composition – only two sides of the paper present a ruled ink line, indicating that the drawing might have been cut – similar to the Return of Ulysses in the Princeton University Art Museum Princeton (inv. x1946-155; see J. Bober in Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, 2014, no. 21, ill.). Jonathan Bober, noting how ‘the loose hand, insouciant, with the abbreviations so knowing, while accounting for the underdrawing’ reveals Cambiaso’s style, has suggested that the drawing is probably an autograph replica or variant of a composition similar to the Princeton sheet (email communication, June 2021).