The Carracci Family

Italian painters

• Agostino Carracci
• Born: August 16, 1557
• Birthplace: Bologna, Papal States (now in Italy)
• Died: February 23, 1602
• Place of death: Parma (now in Italy)

• Annibale Carracci
• Born: November 3, 1560
• Birthplace: Bologna, Papal States (now in Italy)
• Died: July 15, 1609
• Place of death: Rome, Papal States (now in Italy)

From the mid-1580’s onward, the paintings and frescoes of the Carracci family of Bologna made their city one of the major centers of reaction against the mannerist style, an elegant and often overrefined style that had dominated Italian art for sixty or seventy years. When Annibale Carracci went to Rome in the early 1590’s, his work laid the foundation for the magnificent pictorial accomplishments of the Baroque period.

Early Lives

The Carracci (cah-RAHT-chee) family came to Bologna from Cremona, and Ludovico’s father was a butcher named Vincenzo. Agostino and Annibale were his second cousins, the sons of Antonio Carracci, who was a well-known tailor. Ludovico began his artistic studies with Prospero Fontana, the father of painter Lavinia Fontana. According to the Carracci family’s seventeenth century biographer, Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Ludovico’s work was so laborious that Fontana nicknamed him the ox and advised him to not continue with his studies.

Ludovico then went to Florence. For a time he worked with Domenico Passignano and later traveled through northern Italy, where he saw at first hand the works that were to be so important in his artistic development: works by Correggio and Parmigianino, the great sixteenth century masters of Parma and of the region known as Emilia, and by Titian and Paolo Veronese in Venice. By 1578, Ludovico was back in Bologna and was a member of the local painters’ guild.

Agostino initially received some training as a goldsmith and also studied with Fontana. His real master, though, was Domenico Tibaldi, from whom he learned the art of engraving. His engravings, after works by Michelangelo and Baldassare Peruzzi, brought him some success, and he later went to Venice, where he produced engraved copies of works by Veronese and Tintoretto.

Annibale’s training was much less formal, and it is possible that his cousin Ludovico was his only teacher in painting and that he learned engraving from his brother Agostino. In the spring of 1580, Annibale went to Parma in order to see and to paint copies of the works that had made such a deep impression on Ludovico a few years earlier. By late 1580 or early 1581, he was in Venice with Agostino; by about 1582, the brothers had returned to Bologna.

Lives’ Work

In the early 1580’s, all three Carraccis were involved in the development of a unique combination of artistic workshop and art academy, which they called the academy of the eager ones or the academy of the progressives. Considerable emphasis was put on drawing from life, but there were also lessons in anatomy and perspective as well as in architecture. What the Carraccis developed at their “academy” was a program of practical and theoretical instruction aimed at reforming the art of painting, which, as they saw it, had deteriorated into a vapid and boringly repetitive set of formulas, devoid of life and energy.

In the early 1580’s, the Carraccis began to emerge as individual artists, but they also often worked together. By 1584, they had completed their first major joint commission, which was the series of frescoes illustrating the History of Jason in the Palazzo Fava, Bologna (now called the Società Majestic Baglioni). Unfortunately, the frescoes are not in good condition, but their strong illusionism and richness of color can still be appreciated, and there is a remarkable lack of artifice in the easy and naturalistic poses of the figures. This was the first major public manifestation of their doctrine of artistic reform. The fresco cycle in the former Palazzo Magnani was also a joint production, and, when asked to tell which parts each of them had painted, they are said to have replied: “It’s by the Carracci. All of us made it.”

For the next ten years, the Carraccis were actively engaged in creating altarpieces for Bolognese churches, many of which can now be seen in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna. While Agostino devoted much of his time to engraving and to teaching, he was also a painter of note, and The Last Communion of Saint Jerome (1591-1593) is his masterpiece of the period, admired by artists as diverse as Nicolas Poussin and Peter Paul Rubens. Ludovico’s painting of the Madonna of the Bargellini Family (1588) is one of his strongest early paintings, and critics have recognized the qualities of his work. Yet it is clear that by the end of the 1580’s, Annibale had emerged as the most important artist of the three, a painter of great power whose richness of color is matched by his masterful drawing. His Madonna with Saint John Evangelist and Saint Catherine (1593) reveals his brilliant synthesis of the formal order of the High Renaissance with the colorism of Venice and Parma. Annibale also had a lighter side. He was one of the first artists to produce caricatures in the modern sense of the art of caricature, and in his early twenties he painted a number of genre paintings. The Bean Eater (c. 1585) in the Colonna Gallery, Rome, is one of the best a small-scale scene of everyday life rendered with an astonishing boldness and naturalism.

In the mid-1590’s, the Carraccis were invited to go to Rome to work for Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, the brother of the duke of Parma and Piacenza. Annibale accepted the cardinal’s invitation, and Agostino later joined him; Ludovico chose to remain in Bologna, where he continued to direct the Carraccis’ academy, and, in order to ensure that the academy would continue, he tried to have it officially incorporated into the professional association of Bolognese artists. Ludovico’s own late work is uneven, and it is unfortunate that the fresco cycle that he and his pupils executed in San Michele in Bosco (about 1605) is lost and is known only from engravings. Two of the finest works from Ludovico’s later period are the enormous paintings Funeral of the Virgin (1606-1607) and Apostles at the Tomb of the Virgin (c. 1612). He died in Bologna in 1619.

After Annibale’s arrival in Rome in 1595, he developed into an artist of great historical importance. In the Palazzo Farnese, he was first asked to decorate the ceiling and upper walls of a room, now known as Camerino Farnese (Farnese’s little room), with scenes illustrating the adventures of Hercules and Ulysses. In 1597, he began work on a fresco cycle in one of the principal rooms of the palace, the so-called Farnese Gallery.

The Farnese Gallery is Annibale’s masterpiece, and subsequent generations considered it worthy of comparison with Raphael’s frescoes in the Vatican Palace and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. A fictive architecture provides the framework for what appears to be framed easel pictures moved up the ceiling. There are bronze medallions, simulated marble statues, and naturalistic figures of youths sitting on pedestals all painted with such convincing illusionism that distinctions between the real and the painted worlds seem to vanish. The theme is the power of love, and incidents illustrating the loves of the gods and goddesses of antiquity fill the ceiling and the upper walls. Many of the frescoes’ stories are drawn from Metamorphoses (c. 8 c.e.; English translation, 1567) by the Roman poet Ovid; yet behind this joyous and lighthearted exuberance, Annibale’s contemporaries discerned a serious moral allegory.

In the execution of the Farnese Gallery, Annibale had been helped by Agostino, but about 1600 Agostino left Rome and went to Parma, where he remained until his death in 1602. His principal work there was a fresco cycle for the Palazzo del Giardino, but it was not finished when he died and was completed much later by other artists. Annibale continued to work on the gallery, whose lower walls were probably not finished until about 1604. Among his surviving easel paintings from the Roman period are some religious works of great power, such as the Mourning of Christ . His late landscapes were also of great importance for the subsequent history of painting. The finest of these landscapes are the ones that he and his pupils painted for the chapel in the Aldobrandini Palace (modern Galleria Doria-Pamphili, Rome).

In the early part of 1605, Annibale suffered a breakdown, at least partially caused by his bitterness over the small sum of money he was paid for the Farnese Gallery. For the next four years, he was unable to work, and in the summer of 1609, he died in Rome. He was buried in the Pantheon, an unusual honor and one that had also been accorded to Raphael.

Significance

The three Carraccis had a major role in the reformation of the mannerist style, and, while they often worked together, they were distinct and highly individual artists. Ludovico was a gifted teacher, and several of the younger men who were trained by him in the Carraccis’ academy after Annibale left for Rome went on to become important artists. Two of these students, Guido Reni and Domenichino, later became major figures of the Baroque era; yet there were many others of lesser-known distinction but considerable talent whose work provided the basis for the flourishing seventeenth century schools of painting in Bologna and Emilia.

Agostino was more interested in art theory than were the other Carraccis, and, according to one of his biographers, he was a student of mathematics and philosophy. He also composed verses and was a musician. To some extent, his posthumous fame has been dependent on his reputation as a theorist and an intellectual, but his qualities as an artist should not be discounted. He was a fine engraver, and his engravings after Venetian masters such as Veronese helped to spread the fame of their art. Yet he was also an excellent painter, although not as productive as his brother or his cousin.

Annibale’s work gave new life to the tradition of monumental art in the grand manner. In Rome, under the influence of the work of Michelangelo, Raphael, and the sculpture of antiquity, his art matured and his combination of idealism and illusionism provided the greatest inspiration for the younger generation of painters. The Farnese Gallery was the first great fresco cycle of the Baroque era and set a precedent for the fresco cycles of the next two centuries.

Bibliography

Bellori, Giovanni Pietro. The Lives of Annibale and Agostino Carracci. Translated by Catherine Enggass. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967. Giovanni Pietro Bellori’s book was first published in Rome in 1672. This translation of the portion devoted to the Carraccis is the only contemporary biography available in English. Most of the work is devoted to a description of the Farnese Gallery and an explanation of its symbolic meaning.

Boschloo, Anton Willem Adriaan. Annibale Carracci in Bologna: Visible Reality in Art After the Council of Trent. Translated by R. R. Symonds. 2 vols. New York: A. Schram, 1974. A detailed study of Annibale’s work in Bologna and its relationship to the art of his contemporaries and predecessors.

Dempsey, Charles. Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of the Baroque Style. 2d ed. Fiesole, Italy: Cadmo, 2000. An extensive review of the critical evaluations of Annibale’s work and a discussion of the Carracci academy and its role in the reform of painting. Includes illustrations, six leaves of photographic plates, and bibliographic references.

Dempsey, Charles. Annibale Carracci: The Farnese Palace, Rome. New York: G. Braziller, 1995. Monograph on one of Carracci’s most important frescoes. Includes illustrations, glossary, bibliographic references.

Freedberg, Sydney J. Circa 1600: A Revolution of Style in Italian Painting. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. Three lectures given at Cornell University in 1980 and dealing with Annibale and Ludovico Carracci and Caravaggio. Excellent exposition of the nature of the artistic accomplishments of the Carraccis. The final lecture, dealing with Ludovico, is particularly illuminating.

Malvasia, Carlo Cesare, and Anne Summerscale. Malvasia’s “Life of the Carracci”: Commentary and Translation. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. The first translation in any language of one of the most widely referenced biographies of the Carraccis, first published in 1678. The biography is accompanied by a study of the biographer and the place of his work in literary and art history. Includes illustrations, thirty-eight pages of plates, bibliographic references, and index.

Martin, John Rupert. The Farnese Gallery. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965. The basic study of Annibale’s work in the Palazzo Farnese. Richly illustrated and fully documented.

Posner, Donald. Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform of Italian Painting Around 1590. 2 vols. New York: Phaidon Press, 1971. The standard monograph on Annibale. Contains excellent plates and detailed catalog entries of extant works.

Wittkower, Rudolf, Joseph Connors, and Jennifer Montagu. Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600-1750. 6th ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999. Still the basic study of the period. The chapter on the Carraccis is an admirable summary, and there are excellent bibliographies for all the major artists of the period.