Annibale Carracci

Annibale Carracci (Bologna, 1560 – Rome, 1609) was an Italian painter and printmaker and one of the key figures of the early Baroque. The most famous member of the Carracci family of painters, alongside his younger brother Agostino and his cousin Ludovico, he helped shape a current known as Roman-Bolognese classicism. He is often seen as Caravaggio's great artistic rival, since he represented an approach opposed to Caravaggio's. His significance lies in a synthesis of traditions that shaped the painting of the generations that followed.

Training in Bologna

Annibale was born in Bologna and was probably first trained within his family. His cousin Ludovico and the painter Bartolomeo Passarotti are also mentioned as possible teachers. In 1582 he, Agostino and Ludovico opened a studio that was first called the Academy of the Desiderosi, meaning those who desire fame and learning, and later the Incamminati, meaning the progressives, or those who open a new way. The school eventually came to be known as the Eclectics. Their aim was to renew a painting that they felt had decayed during Mannerism and that now seemed threatened by the naturalism of Caravaggio, whom some called the Antichrist of art.

Eclecticism between Florence and Venice

The Carracci placed special emphasis on the linear drawing of the Florentine tradition, as seen in Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, rather than the loose, apparently unplanned designs associated with Caravaggio. They were also drawn to the rich, subtly modulated colour of Venice, above all the work of Titian, which Annibale and Agostino studied during their journeys around Italy in 1580–81 at the urging of Ludovico. This blend of sources became the defining trait of the Bolognese school, whose most prominent followers included Domenichino and Guido Reni.

In many early works it is hard to tell one brother's hand from another. The frescoes on the story of Jason in Bologna's Palazzo Fava (c. 1583–84) bear the Carracci signature, which suggests all three took part. In 1585 Annibale completed a Baptism of Christ for the church of San Gregorio in Bologna, and in 1587 he painted an Assumption for San Rocco in Reggio Emilia. Around 1593 he finished, with Lucio Massari, a Virgin enthroned with Saints John and Catherine, and his Resurrection of Christ also dates from that year.

The Farnese ceiling

Around 1595 Cardinal Odoardo Farnese wanted the piano nobile of the gloomy Palazzo Farnese in Rome decorated, a building now home to the French embassy. Annibale had been recommended by the Duke of Parma, Ranuccio I Farnese. In November and December 1595 he travelled to Rome with Agostino to begin the Camerino with scenes from the life of Hercules, a fitting theme since the room housed the famous Farnese Hercules statue. Agostino soon withdrew because of disagreements.

Annibale produced hundreds of sketches and led a team that painted the ceiling of the grand salon with mythological scenes of the loves of the gods. The biographer Giovanni Bellori described the whole as Human Love Governed by Celestial Love. The decoration pairs a notably rich illusionism with a restrained classicism modelled on Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling and on Raphael's loggias in the Vatican. For the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was regarded as an unrivalled masterpiece of fresco of its time. His preparatory drawings were studied as models of composition for large history paintings.

Caravaggio and the quarrel over style

The seventeenth-century critic Giovanni Bellori, in his treatise Idea, presented Carracci as the paragon of Italian painters, a promoter of a rebirth of the great tradition of Raphael and Michelangelo. Bellori admired Caravaggio's talent but lamented his naturalism and, even more, his turbulent character. Still, patrons of the time such as the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani valued both men, and patrons and pupils did not split into irreconcilable camps.

The technical contrast was clear. Caravaggio almost never worked in fresco, which was regarded as the true test of a great painter, while Carracci excelled at it. Caravaggio's dark canvases suited contemplative altarpieces, but not well-lit walls and ceilings like those of the Farnese palace. Wittkower found in these frescoes a tremendous joy in living. Today, however, many visitors to the Cerasi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo focus on Caravaggio and overlook Carracci's Assumption, which is worth comparing with Caravaggio's own Death of the Virgin.

Landscape, genre and caricature

Carracci was remarkably eclectic. He painted history, landscapes, genre scenes and portraits, and left a series of self-portraits across his career. He was one of the first Italian painters to give landscape priority over figures, as in his Flight into Egypt, and in that genre he was followed by Domenichino, his favourite pupil, and Claude Lorrain. His less formal side appears in his caricatures and early genre pictures such as The Beaneater. His late works include Saint Roch Giving Alms of 1595 and Domine, quo vadis? (c. 1602), whose economy of composition and precision of gesture influenced Poussin.

Melancholy and final years

Around 1600 Annibale fell into a depression, perhaps because his laborious frescoes in the Palazzo Farnese were poorly paid and coolly appreciated. In April 1606 Cardinal Odoardo Farnese complained that a "heavy melancholic humour" kept Annibale from painting for him. That same year Annibale signed a print, the Madonna of the Bowl. In 1607 he could not finish a Nativity commissioned by the Duke of Modena, and in 1608 he agreed with a pupil that he would spend at least two hours a day in his studio. Little documentation explains why his brush fell silent, and speculation abounds. He later suffered paralysis in one arm and relied on assistants.

The murals of the Herrera Chapel in the church of Santiago de los Españoles in Rome are dated to these years, and were completed by his assistants. When the church was sold in the mid-nineteenth century, the frescoes were removed from the walls. They are now divided between the MNAC in Barcelona and the Prado in Madrid. Annibale died in Rome in 1609 and, as he wished, was buried near Raphael in the Pantheon.

Legacy

Artists as different as Bernini, Poussin and Rubens praised his work. Many of his assistants and pupils, at the Farnese palace or in the Herrera Chapel, became the leading artists of the following decades. They included Domenichino, Francesco Albani, Giovanni Lanfranco, Domenico Viola, Guido Reni and Sisto Badalocchio. In the following century, neoclassical critics such as Winckelmann, and later John Ruskin, criticised Baroque art in general. Carracci was partly spared that reproach, because he was seen as an emulator of Raphael and because his frescoes drew on the themes of ancient mythology.