CAMBIASI, LUCA (1527-1585), Genoese painter, famil iarly known as Lucchetto da Genova (his surname is written also Cambiaso or Cangiagio), was born at Moneglia in the Genoese state, the son of a painter named Giovanni Cambiasi. At the age of 15 he painted, with his father, some subjects from Ovid's Metamorphoses on the front of a house in Genoa, and afterwards, in conjunction with Marcantonio Calvi, a ceiling showing great daring of execution in the Palazzo Doria. Lucchetto's best artistic period lasted for twelve years after his first successes. In he accepted an invitation from Philip II. to continue in the Es corial a series of frescoes which had been begun by his friend Giambattista Castello. He died in the Escorial in the second year of his sojourn. Cambiasi painted sometimes with a brush in each hand, and with a certainty equalling or transcending that even of Tintoret. He made a vast number of drawings, and was also something of a sculptor, executing in this branch of art a figure of Faith. His son Orazio became likewise a painter, studying under Lucchetto.
The best works of Cambiasi are to be seen in Genoa. In the church of S. Giorgio, the martyrdom of that saint ; in the Palazzo Imperiali Terralba, a Genoese suburb, a fresco of the "Rape of the Sabines"; in S. Maria da Carignano, a "Pieta" containing his own portrait and (according to tradition) that of his sister-in-law, whom he loved, and who after the death of his wife, had taken charge of his household. In the Escorial he executed several pic tures; one is a Paradise on the vaulting of the church, with a multitude of figures. For this picture he received 12,00o ducats, probably the largest sum that had, up to that time, ever been given for a single work.