Annibale Carracci

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Annibale Carracci (Bologna, November 3, 1560 - Rome, July 15, 1609 was a prominent Italian Baroque painter.

 

Early career

Annibale in all likelihood first apprenticed within his family. In 1582, Annibale, his brother Agostino, and his cousin Ludovico Carracci opened a painter's studio, called by some initially as the Academy of Desiderosi (Desirous of fame and learning) or subsequently of the Incamminati (progressives; literally "of those opening a new way"). While the Carraccis laid emphasis on the typically Florentine linear draftsmanship, as exemplified by Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, their style also derived from Venetian painters an attention to the glimmering colors and mistier edge of objects. This eclecticism would define artists of the Baroque Emilian or Bolognese School.

It is difficult to distinguish the individual contributions by each Carracci in many early works in Bologna. For example, the frescoes on the story of Jason for the Palazzo Fava in Bologna (c. 1583-84); the frescoes are signed by Carracci and state that they all contributed. In 1585, Annibale completed an altarpiece of the Baptism of Christ for the church of San Gregorio in Bologna. In 1587, he painted the Assumption for the church of San Rocco in Reggio Emilia.

In 1587-88, Annibale is known to have have traveled to Parma and then Venice, where he met up with his brother Agostino. From 1589-92, the three Carracci complete the frescoes on the Founding of Rome for the Palazzo Magnani in Bologna. By 1593, Annibale completed by an altarpiece, Virgin on the throne with St John and St Catherine, working alongside with Lucio Massari. His Resurrection of Christ also dates from the year 1593. In 1592, he paints an Assumption for the Bonasoni chapel in San Francesco. During 1593-1594, all three Carracci work at frescoes in the Palazzo Sampieri in Bologna.

Frescoes in Palazzo Farnese

Based on the prolific and masterful fresco work of the Carracci in Bologna, Annibale is recommended by the Duke of Parma, Ranuccio Farnese, to his brother, the Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, who wished to decorate the salons of the piano nobile of the cavernous Roman Palazzo Farnese. In November-December of 1595, Annibale travels to Rome to begin work lasting two years, along with Agostino, in decorating a small room in the Farnese (called the Camerino) with stories of Hercules; aptly because the room housed the famous Greco-Roman sculpture of the hypermuscular Farnese Hercules.

He also developed hundreds of preparatory sketches for the major product, wherein he led a team painting frescoes on the ceiling of the grand salon with the secular quadri riportati of The Loves of the Gods, or as the critic Giovanni Bellori described it, Human Love governed by Celestial Love. Although the ceiling is riotously rich in the interplay of illusionistic elements, it is framed in the restrained classicism of High Renaissance decoration, drawing inspiration, yet more immediate and intimate than Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling as well as Raphael's Vatican Loggie and Villa Farnesina frescoes. His work would later inspire the untrammelled stream of Baroque illusionism and energy that would emerge in the grand frescoes of Cortona, Lanfranco, and in later decades Andrea Pozzo and Gaulli.

Throughout 17th and 18th centuries, the Farnese Ceiling ranked alongside other cycles as an influential masterpiece of fresco painting. They were not only seen as a pattern book of heroic figure design, but also as a model of technical procedure; Annibale’s hundreds of preparatory drawings for the ceiling became a fundamental step in composing any ambitious history painting.

Contrast with Caravaggio

The 17th century critic Giovanni Bellori, in his survey titled Idea, praised Carracci as the paragon of Italian painters, who had fostered a “renaissance” of the great tradition of Raphael and Michelangelo. On the other hand, while admitting Carravaggio's talents as a painter, Bellori deplored his over-naturalistic style, if not his turbulent morals and persona. He thus viewed the Caravaggisti styles with the same gloomy dismay. Painters were urged to depict the Platonic ideal of beauty, not Roman street-walkers. Yet Carracci and Caravaggio patrons and pupils did not all fall into irreconcilable camps. Contemporary patrons, such as Marquess Vincenzo Giustiniani, found both applied showed excellence in maniera and modeling^[1].

In our century, observers have warmed to the rebel myth of Caravaggio, and often ignore the profound influence on art that Carracci had. Caravagio almost never worked in fresco, regarded as the test of a great painter's mettle. On the other hand, Carracci's best works are in fresco. Thus the somber canvases of Caravaggio, with benighted backgrounds, are suited to the contemplative altars, and not to well lit walls or ceilings such as this one in the Farnese. Wittkower was surprised that a Farnese cardinal surrounded himself with frescoes of libidinous themes, indicative of a "considerable relaxation of counter-reformatory morality". This thematic choice suggests Carracci may have been more rebellious relative to the often-solemn religious passion of Caravaggio's canvases. Wittkower states Carracci's "frescoes convey the impression of a tremendous joie de vivre, a new blossoming of vitality and of an energy long repressed".

Today, unfortunately, most connoisseurs making the pilgrimage to the Cerasi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo would ignore Caracci’s Assumption of the Virgin altarpiece (1600-1601) and focus on the stunning flanking Caravaggio works. It is instructive to compare the theologic and artistic differences between Carracci's Assumption (1601)^[2] and Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin. Among early contemporaries, Carracci would have been an innovator. He re-enlivened the Michelangelo's visual fresco vocabulary, and posited a muscular and vivaciously brilliant pictorial landscape, which had been becoming progressively crippled into a Mannerist tangle. While Michelangelo could bend and contort the body into all the possible perspectives, Carracci in the Farnese frescoes had shown how it could dance. The "ceiling"-frontiers, the wide expanses of walls to be frescoed would, for the next decades, be thronged by the monumental brilliance of the Carracci followers, and not Caravaggio's followers.

In the following century, it was not the admirers of Carravaggio, who would have dismissed Carracci, but to a lesser extent than Bernini and Cortona, baroque art in general came under criticism from neoclassic critics such as Winckelmann and even later from the prudish John Ruskin. Carracci in part was spared opprobrium because he was seen as an emulator of the highly admired Raphael, and in the Farnese frescoes, attentive to the proper themes such as those of antique mythology.

Landscapes, genre art, and drawings

In July 8, 1595, Annibale completes the painting of San Rocco distributing alms now in Dresden Gemaldegalerie.Other significant late works painted by Carracci in Rome include Domine, Quo Vadis? (c1602), which reveals a striking economy in figure composition and a force and precision of gesture that influenced on Poussin and through him, the language of gesture in painting.

Carracci was remarkably eclectic in thematic, painting landcapes, genre scenes, and portraits, including a series of autoportraits across the ages. He was one of the first Italian painters to paint a canvases wherein landscape took priority over figures, such as his masterful The Flight into Egypt; this is a genre in which he was followed by Domenichino (his favorite pupil) and Lorraine.

Carracci's art also had a less formal side that comes out in his caricatures (he is generally credited with inventing the form) and in his early genre paintings, which are remarkable for their lively observation and free handling (see The Butcher's Shop) and his painting of The Beaneater. He is described by biographers as inattentive to dress, obsessed with work: his self-portraits vary in his depiction ^[3]

Under a melancholic humor

It is not clear how much work Annibale completed after finishing work in the Palazzo Farnese. In 1606, Annibale signs a Madonna of the bowl. However, in a letter from April 1606, the cardinal Odoarde Farnese bemoans that a "heavy melancholic humor" prevented Annibale from painting for him. Throughout 1607, Annibale is unable to complete a commission for the Duke of Modena of a Nativity. There is a note from 1608, where in Annibale stipulates to a pupil that he will spend at least two hours a day in his studio.

There is little documentation from the man or time to explain why his brush was stilled. Speculation abounds.

In 1609, Annibale dies, and was buried, according to his wish, near Raphael in the Pantheon of Rome. It is a measure of his achievement that artists as diverse as Bernini, Poussin, and Rubens praised his work. Many of his assistants or pupils in projects at the Palazzo Farnese and Herrera Chapel would become among the pre-eminent artists of the next decades, including Domenichino, Francesco Albani, Giovanni Lanfranco, Domenico Viola, Guido Reni, Sisto Badalocchio, and others.

Chronology of works

• Assumption of the Virgin (c. 1590) - Oil on canvas, 130 x 97 cm, Museo del Prado
• The Baptism of Christ (1584) - Oil on canvas, San Gregorio, Bologna
• The Beaneater (1580-1590) - Oil on canvas, 57 x 68 cm, Galleria Colonna, Rome
• Butcher's Shop (1580s) - Oil on canvas, 185 x 266 cm, Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford
• Crucifixion (1583) - Oil on canvas, 305 x 210 cm, Santa Maria della Carità, Bologna
• Fishing (before 1595) - Oil on canvas, 136 x 253 cm, [[Musée du Louvre]
• Hunting (before 1595) - Oil on canvas, 136 x 253 cm, Musée du Louvre
• The Laughing Youth (1583) - Oil on paper, Galleria Borghese, Rome
• Madonna Enthroned with St Matthew (1588) - Oil on canvas, 384 x 255 cm, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden
• The Mystic Marriage of St Catherine (1585-1587) - Oil on canvas, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples
• Venus, Adonis and Cupid (c. 1595) - Oil on canvas, 212 x 268 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid
• River Landscape (c. 1599) - Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. [2]
• Venus and Adonis (c. 1595) - Oil on canvas, 217 x 246 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
• Venus with a Satyr and Cupids (c. 1588) - Oil on canvas, 112 x142 cm, Uffizi, Florence
• The Virgin Appears to the Saints Luke and Catherine (1592) - Oil on canvas, 401 x 226 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris
• Frescoes (1597-1605) in the Palazzo Farnese, Rome
• Assumption of the Virgin Mary (1600-1601) - Oil on canvas, 245 x 155 cm, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome
• Lamentation of Christ (1606) - Oil on canvas, 92,8 x 103,2 cm, National Gallery, London
• The Flight into Egypt (1603) - Oil on canvas, 122 x 230 cm, Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome
• The Choice of Heracles (c. 1596) - Oil on canvas, 167 x 273 cm, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples
• Mocking of Christ (c. 1596) - Oil on canvas, 60 x 69,5 cm, Pinacoteca Nazionale
• Pietà (1599-1600) - Oil on canvas, 156 x 149 cm, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples
• Domine quo vadis? (1601-1602) - Oil on panel, 77,4 x 56,3 cm, National Gallery, London
• Rest on Flight into Egypt (c. 1600) - Oil on canvas, diameter 82,5 cm, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
• Self-Portrait in Profile (1590s) - Oil on canvas, Uffizi, Florence
• Self-portrait (c. 1604) - Oil on wood, 42 x 30 cm, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
• The Martyrdom of St Stephen (1603-1604) - Oil on canvas, 51 x 68 cm, Louvre, Paris
• Triptych (1604-1605) - Oil on copper and panel, 37 x 24 cm (central panel), 37 x 12 cm (each wing), Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome
• Holy Women at the Tomb of Christ Oil on canvas, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
• Atlante Sanguine, Louvre, Paris
• Drawings (exhibit, National Gallery of Art) [3]

Sources

• Catholic Encyclopedia: Carracci
• Wittkower, Rudolf (1993). “Art and Architecture Italy, 1600-1750”, Pelican History of Art, 1980, Penguin Books Ltd, 57-71.
• Gianfranco, Malafarina (1976). L' opera completa di Annibale Carracci, preface by Patrick J. Cooney. Ruzzoli Editore, Milano.

Footnotes