Luca Cambiaso

Luca Cambiaso was the busiest painter in Genoa for most of the 16th century, filling the city's palaces and churches with frescoes. What keeps his name alive now is stranger and smaller: a handful of pen drawings in which he built human figures out of blocks, reducing an arm or a torso to plain geometric solids. Sketched around the 1560s, they look uncannily like something from three centuries later, and modern viewers keep reaching for the word cubist.

In 1583 Philip II of Spain, then finishing his vast monastery-palace of El Escorial outside Madrid, summoned him to paint its ceilings. Cambiaso covered the vault of the monastery church with a crowded Paradise of saints and angels, and was paid a sum said to be the largest given for a single work up to that time.

He did not enjoy it. His wife had died in Genoa, and he had fallen in love with her sister. When the Church refused him a dispensation to marry her, he sank into a deep melancholy. He died at the Escorial in 1585, still hoping the king would step in on his behalf.