Luca Cambiaso: idea, pratica, ideologia

This essay, which served as an introduction to both the American and the Italian editions of the monographic exhibition dedicated to Luca Cambiaso (Austin, 2006 and Genoa, 2007) aims to reconstruct the artist’s progress in the whole span of his career. Cambiaso sought to establish himself by systematically work¬ing to acquire a mastery of the various elements of painting - perspective, movement, colour, light - and to combine these elements in his practice. Propor¬tion/motion and colour/light can be viewed separately throughout Cambiaso's career. The terms of former, shaped by the influence of Michelangelo, and quickly established while Luca was still very young, and coherently demonstrated in his draftsman through to the end of his career. Colour and light, due to the eclectic range of artists that informed Cambiaso's work over the years, are more changeable: the artist anxiously tried out solutions that might resolve the dichotomy, pointed out early on by Lomazzo, between the quality of his disegno, which was capable of competing with Michelangelo's, and the difficulty he had in translating "such proportions" into painting in a way "similar to the true manner”. In the middle phase of his career, through the relationship between figures and space, the discussions "about the difficulties of art"- with Alessi e Giovan Battista Castello- was confirmation for Cambiaso that it was necessary to find a method that would solve the problem of the representation and proportion of the human figure in movement. He thought he could silence Danti's doubts , who affirms the apparent im¬possibility of reconciling architecture, built accord¬ing to points and lines and thus subject to the rules of measurement, and the human body, which eludes such rules. Cambiaso trans¬pose the human body into a "linear figure" consist¬ing of points and lines, translating it into three-di¬mensional geometric forms to be inserted into and examined in space. He was firmly convinced that he could proceed from inception to final execution us¬ing a single guiding criterion. But it was clear to the artist that fixed rules are only established through a simplification of the complexity of natural data. This is the source of ambiguity of a system in which theoretical statement and practical correction meet: having developed what was as close as possible to being an "exact" method in the rendering of the hu¬man figure in space, in actual fact he then limited himself to producing geometric forms that were elaborated, however, with the freedom of artistic in¬spiration, potentially measurable but not in fact measured. The ambiguity is evident in the transposition to the fresco: Cambiaso concen¬trated exclusively on transforming artifice into nat¬uralness, on shaping human flesh, on mixing colours exuberantly and lavishly, on producing what was an abundance of detail given the visual distance of the fresco, on the richness of colour and the vigour of his brushstrokes, and on the creation of powerful shafts of light. The artist’s experiments, focus on the problem of the passage from geometric and stereometric simplification to a naturalistic rendition of human figures: to achieve the latter, Cambiaso moves through eclectic influences - from Correggesque to venetian suggestions – combining them with an original and free brushwork which is uniquely his own. From the Seventies on, while engaged in a reconsideration of the meditative and religious values of images: the general focus of Cambiaso’s painting was on searching for an angle and stance on the debate about the role of painting stemming from Tridentine issues. In these years Cambiaso seems to have abandoned his struggle to achieve an equilibrium in his work, accepting the notion of divide between the “ideology” of the representation and the mimetic and aesthetic quality of painting. The artist creates a reality of the imagination, parallel with the natural one, but not coincident with it. The tendency to simplify the figure was now consciously put at the service of the moral and religious intent. The “geometric severity” of the Escorial is the final, extreme mirror in which Luca Cambiaso could see reflected his idealized and impossible desire to re-establish a totalising “measure” of representation.