Annibale Carracci

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

1 Early career
2 Frescoes in Palazzo Farnese
3 Contrast with Baroque Contemporary: Caravaggio
4 Other Works
5 Late career
6 Chronology of works
7 External links

[edit] Early career

In the Bologna of the early 1580s, his cousin Ludovico Carracci along with Annibale's brother Agostino, opened a painter's Academy of Desiderosi (Desirous of fame and learning), later it was called the Academy of Incamminati ( progressives; degli Incamminati "of those opening a new way," or "of the beginners."); and finally the "School of the Eclectics". The 17th century critic Giovanni Bellori, in his survey titled Idea, praised Carracci as the epitome of Roman Baroque. While the Carraccis laid emphasis on the typically Florentine linear draftsmanship, their style also abstracted from Venetian masters an attention to the glimmering use of color and mistier edge of objects. This eclecticism defines artists of the central Italian Bolognese School, including their most prominent trainees of the Carraccis: Domenichino and Reni.

Annibale is known to have completed a Virgin with St John and St Catherine by 1593; the style is eclectic, a mixing of Urbino-Tuscan attention to drawing Andrea del Sarto infused with a delight in painterly, colorful Venetian brush. It is difficult to distinguish the individual contributions by each Carracci brother in many early works, including frescoes in the Palazzo Fava in Bologna (c.1583-84), where worked together until 1595, when Annibale, the best known, was called to Rome by Cardinal Odoardo Farnese to decorate the gallery in the Palazzo Farnese.

[edit] Frescoes in Palazzo Farnese

Annibale first decorated, in 1595-97, a small room in the Palazzo Farnese (called the Camerino) with stories of Hercules; aptly because the room housed the famous Greco-Roman sculpture of the hypermuscular Farnese Hercules. Starting 1597, he led a team painting frescoes on the ceiling of the grand salon with the secular themes of The Loves of the Gods, or as 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 from 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 still to begin in the work 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 made hundreds of preparatory drawings for the ceiling, which accepted as a fundamental part of composing any ambitious history painting.

[edit] Contrast with Baroque Contemporary: Caravaggio

Carracci pupils and Caravaggisti did not occupy irreconcilable camps. Contemporary patrons, such as Marchese Vincenzo Giutianini, found both applied showed excellence in maniera and modeling(#1, p57). Ultimately, while modern observers warm to Caravaggio's rebel myth, Annibale likely exercised a more profound influence on the art world in the decades to come. The former almost never worked in fresco, regarded as the test of a great painter's mettle. In addition, the somber canvases of Caravaggio, with almost nigh a sky, are suited to the contemplative altars, not well lit walls or ceilings. Wittkower is surprised that a Farnese cardinal would surround himself with frescoes of this mildly 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 visitors to the Cerasi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo would ignore his Assumption altarpiece and focus on the stunning flanking Caravaggio works. It is instructive to compare the theologic and artistic differences between Carracci's Assumption (1601) 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. 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.

Image:Carracci-Assumption of the Virgin Mary.jpg

[edit] Other Works

Other significant late works painted by Annibale in Rome include Domine, Quo Vadis? (National Gallery, London, c.1602), which reveals a striking economy in figure composition and a force and precision of gesture that influenced on Poussin and through him on the language of gesture in painting. Annibale was one of the first Italian painters to paint a canvases wherein landscape take 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.

Annibale'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.

The Carraccis often worked together. Agostino assisted Annibale in the Farnese Gallery from 1597 to 1600, but he was important mainly as a teacher and engraver. His systematic anatomical studies were engraved after his death and were used for nearly two centuries as teaching aids.

[edit] Late career

He spent the last two years in Parma, where he did his own "Farnese Ceiling", decorating a ceiling in the Palazzo del Giardino with mythological scenes for Duke Ranuccio Farnese. It shows a meticulous but less spirited version of his brother's lively Classicism.

Ludovico left Bologna only for brief periods and directed the Carracci academy by himself after his cousins had gone to Rome. Painterly and expressive considerations always outweigh those of stability and calm classicism in his work, and at its best there is a passionate and poetic quality indicative of his preference for Tintoretto and Jacopo Bassano. His most fruitful period was 1585-95, but near the end of his career he still produced remarkable paintings of an almost Expressionist force, such as the Christ Crucified above Figures in Limbo (Santa Francesco Romana, Ferrara, 1614).

After 1606, Annibale was overcome by melancholia and gave up painting almost entirely. He was buried, according to his wish, near Raphael in the Pantheon, Rome. It is a measure of his achievement that artists as diverse as Bernini, Poussin, and Rubens praised his work.