|
Carracci Family
CARRACCI
There were three important members of this Bolognese family: Lodovico, and his cousins Agnostino and Annibale, who were brothers.
LODOVICO (1555-1619), as eldest, probably took the lead in establishing the workshop and the family style. He seems to have entered the Bologna Guild in 1578, but had already been to Parma and Venice, where he was influenced by Correggio and Tintoretto respectively. His first surviving signed and dated work is of 1588 (Bolgna, Pinacoteca), but by 1585/6 he had founded, with his cousins, the teaching academy in Bologna which became the most celebrated of its kind and was responsible for the training of most major Bolognese painters of the next generation, including Domenichino, Reni and Guercino. He ran the academy alone after his cousins left Bologna (except for a period in Rome, 1602-c.1605), but after this there was a notable falling-off in his work, and he dwindled into a painter of large, rather sentimental and didactic Counter-Reformation altarpieces, with none of the originality that his cousins, particularly Annibale, had stimulated in him. Such an altarpiece, dated 1619, was once in Notre-Dame, Paris, but now seems to be lost.
AGNOSTIN (1557-1602) was principally an engraver who executed many plates after works by High Renaissance, and particularly Venetian, artists. He visitd Venice and North italy in 1580-81 and was in Parma with Annibale c.1585. His wide knowledge of North italian painting reinforced the trend away from the dying forms of Roman Mannerism and towards a fresh evaluation of the part to be played by the High Renaissance and classical tradition in the creation of the new and revitalized painting which culminated in the Baroque. He was in Rome in 1587-9, working with Annibale on the Farnese Gallery, but by 1600 had moved to Parma and was working for the Farnese family there when he died. His major altarpiece, The Last Communion of St Jerome (Bologna), greatly influenced Domenichino.
ANNIBALE (1560-1609), was a pupil of Ludovico, and was by far the greatest artist of the three. He may have travelled in Tuscany c.1583-4, was in Parma with Agnostino and almost certainly visited Venice c.1585/6. He participated with Ludovico and Agnostino in the academy, and they all shared in the decoration of the Fava (1584) and Magnani (1588-91) Palaces in Bologna. In 1595 he went to Rome to work for Cardinal Farnese on the decoration of the Farnese Palace, and for this he first executed the 'Camerino', with an elaborate ceiling with subjects from classical mythology in fresco surrounding an oil-painting of Hercules at the Crossroads (now in Naples). The gallery, which he undertook next, is a room some sixty-feet long by twenty-two feet wide, with a high barrel-vault for which he designed an elaborately illusionistic arrangement of mythological pictures supported by herms against an open colonnade, with, seated above the cornice, nude male figures reminiscent of those in Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling. The Farnese Gallery ranks with Raphael's decorations in the Stanze and the Farnesina and Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling as one of the great decorative schemes. In its illusionism and imaginative scope it has a lightness of touch, a sense of humour, and a freshness of vision and fancy transcending his other works, where the conscious recreation of the grander aspects of High Renaissance painters such as Raphael, Correggio, Andrea del Sarto, and the Venetians, is more readily perceptible. He was helped in the Gallery by Agnostino until 1599, and by Domenichino (particularly in the landscapes) and Albani. It was finished by 1604, and in 1605 Annibale was first attacked by the illness which virtually prevented him from working and eventually killed him.
The term eclectic, now abandoned, was formerly applied to the Carracci as an imputation that their use of Renaissance and Classical traditions involved a deliberate policy of selection and combination of the forms and concepts, often mutually incompatible, characterizing the style of their predecessors. There is no evidence of any such specific programme underlying either the teaching in their academy or their own works, which illustrate the truism that all art is nourished by tradition.
ANTONIO (c.1583-1618), an illegitimate son of Agnostino, and FRANCESCO, an illegitimate brother of Agnostino and Annibale, were also painters and worked a s assidstants.
There are works by one or more of the Carracci in the Royal Coll., in Amsterdam, Berlin, Birmingham, Bologna (Mus. and churches), Boston, Brussels, Cambridge (Fitzwm), Dresden, Florence (Uffizi), Indianapolis, Leicester, London (NG, V&A, Dulwich), Milan (Brera), Modena, Munich, Naples, Oxford (Ch. Ch. - a rare genre subject, The Butcher's Shop), Paris (Louvre), Parma, Rome (Borghese, Capitoline, Colonna, Doria, Spada Galls.), Sheffield, Vatican, Venice (Accad.) and Vienna.
Carracci rarities @ ebay.com (direct link to rarities) -
Source: The Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists (Penguin Reference Books)
BOOK
Affiliate/Advertising policy.
Leonardo
Giovanni Bellini prints @ amazon.co.uk (direct link to his prints)
Affiliate/Advertising policy.
Book Must Read:
|
|
|