Getty Museum
Study for a Ceiling
Creator
Lattanzio GambaraItalian Artist · 1530–1574
All works by this person →Cremonese painter Giulio Campi discovered Lattanzio Gambara, a tailor's son, in 1545. Campi took him to Cremona as his pupil and taught him the then-fashionable Lombard and Emilian Mannerist style. Four years later Gambara returned to Brescia, where he studied under Brescia's most important painter, with whom he later collaborated regularly and whose daughter he married in 1556. A prolific fresco
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- 1565–1570
- Medium
- Pen and brown ink, and brush and brown and gray washes over black chalk, heightened with white opaque watercolor, on light brown paper
- Culture
- Italian
- Department
- Drawings
- Institution
- Getty Museum
At the very center of this elaborate, illusionistic design for a ceiling stands the Virgin Mary, on a bank of clouds supported by three putti. She seems to float at the top of several tiers. At the bottom level, winged angels hold back fabric draped over the enormous ogee arches. Above the arches, the walls are decorated with scrolled brackets and medallions containing portrait busts. On the next level, Doric columns support an ornate coffered ceiling. The Virgin's image appears to be set into an oval panel above this ceiling. Lattanzio Gambarra used this drawing as a preparatory study for the ceiling of a monastic church near the Italian town of Cremona. He and an architectural painter received the commission in 1568, but they probably never began the work since the whole ceiling was destroyed in 1573.
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