Reflections in the Space of Luca Cambiaso and Franco Albini

The monographic exhibition which Genoa dedicated to Luca Cambiaso in 2007 opened with the famous Self-portrait with the portrait of his Father Gio-vanni (ca. 1570), where the figure in natural size of Luca can be seen in a room in penumbra, in front of the painting he is making. The personages depicted present gestures, positions and attitudes which may refer not only to other epi-sodes of Luca’s work and to the echo they may have had on his later pictorial experience, but also to various hypotheses concerning conception and dating. In 2004, the painting found its place in the Gallery of Palazzo Bianco in Gen-oa. Now that it has become part of the museographic setting designed by Fran-co Albini according to the cultural project of Caterina Marcenaro (1949), the painting has created in combination with it a dizzying apparatus. The room on the courtyard floor provokes more than one reflection in the onlooker concern-ing the properties of space, codes regulating its use and perception and memory of things. The location of the canvas is decisive in producing an ex-tension into the real environment of the space depicted in it, theatre both of the transmitting capacities of the work and of our possibility for establishing meaningful relations with it.