Luca Cambiaso (Moneglia 1527 - Madrid El Escorial 1585), Ecce Homo

oil on canvas, 116x92 cm, The painting documents very well the fame that Luca Cambiaso, a singular and imaginative painter, enjoyed not only among his contemporaries, who were widely courted at the time by the Este court, Catherine II and Christina of Sweden, but also among posterity. Modern critics, in fact, have not failed to be passionate about that "cubism in inere" discovered by his graphic production, ending up by making him an ante-litteram visionary. Born in Genoa, a devotee of the dictates of the Counter-Reformation, Cambiaso here performs an extraordinary luminous experimentalism: the violent light flashes on the complexions, the thugs emerge from the shadows, the marbled tones of the clothes send out iridescent flashes and the earthy and burnt palette is grafted onto that fertile cultural Lombard background that will characterize the production of the generations to come, from Cairo to Cerano, from Feria to Barbelli. We are in the eighth decade of the sixteenth century, when Cambiaso "abandoned the pictorial richness and persuasive touches of the previous years" (A. Manzitti) to pursue a renewed compositional balance, lowering the tones by a few degrees, softening the atmosphere and measuring the brushstroke in the slow unravelling of the forms. It almost seems as if he is preparing to face the court of Spain, which before him had welcomed and greatly admired the "tenebrism" of the last Titian, and which in 1583, at the behest of Philip II, made him court painter and sent him to the scaffolding of the Escorial. Similar to our canvas, the version in the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin is known (Suida Manning, Suida 1958, p 161, Magnani 1995 p 270 note). Compared to the Texan painting, however, ours seems to be a few years older and more decisive in its turn towards the night, anticipating certain results by Caravaggio. It is not improbable that Merisi was fascinated by the manner of Nostro, one of the favourite artists in the collection of Vicenzo Giustiniani, a fundamental patron of the Lombard painter.