Annibale Carracci | Baroque Era painter

Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) was the most admired painter of his time and the vital force in the creation of Baroque style ⎆. Together with his cousin Ludovico (1555-1619) and his older brother Agostino (1557-1602) -each an outstanding artist- Annibale set out to transform Italian painting ⎆.

The Carracci rejected the artificiality of Mannerist painting ⎆, championing a return to nature coupled with the study of the great northern Italian painters of the Renaissance ⎆, especially Correggio ⎆, Titian ⎆ and Veronese ⎆.

During the 1580s, the Carracci were painting the most radical and innovative pictures in Europe. Annibale not only drew from nature, he created a new, broken brushwork to capture movement and the effects of light on form.

His Two Children Teasing a Cat (ca. 1590) marks a new chapter in the history of genre painting. In Ludovico's early and still unresolved Lamentation (ca. 1582), the figure of Christ -clearly studied from a posed model in the studio- gives the picture a jarring immediacy and actuality.

The revolutionary potential of this new kind of painting would be taken up over a decade later by Caravaggio ⎆, who must have seen the Carracci's work while traveling from Milan to Rome in 1592.

The Carracci saw themselves as heir to a great artistic tradition and they consciously situated themselves within the history of northern Italian painting. Annibale and Agostino visited Parma and Venice to study the work of Correggio, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese.

Their altarpieces and secular fresco cycles in Bologna reasserted a northern Italian emphasis on color, light, and the study of nature, but with a new focus on emotive communication. Their success led to Annibale being invited to Rome to work for the powerful Farnese family, 1595. Ludovico remained in Bologna to direct the academy they founded. Through the next generation of painters -Francesco Albani, Domenichino, Guido Reni, Giovanni Lanfranco, and Guercino-Bolognese painting became the dominant force in seventeenth-century art.

In Rome, Annibale's painting was transformed through his first-hand encounter with classical antiquity and the art of Michelangelo and Raphael ⎆.
Individual scenes of ancient mythology are surrounded by an elaborate illusionistic framework with feigned statues, in front of which sit muscular figures seemingly lit from the actual windows (view of the ceiling of the Farnese Gallery).

The corners are opened to painted views of the sky. When unveiled in 1600, the ceiling was instantly acclaimed as the equal of any work in the past. In combining northern Italian naturalism with the idealism of Roman painting, Annibale created the basis of Baroque art ⎆. His only challenger in Rome was Caravaggio, whose relation with the past was combative rather than assimilative.

Moreover, Caravaggio's art was unsuited to large compositions and fresco cycles, and by 1630 Caravaggesque painting was in decline while Annibale's art was being studied by a new generation of artists. Rubens, Poussin, and Bernini were deeply indebted to Annibale. | Keith Christiansen Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Carracci, Annibale - Pittore (Bologna 1560 - Roma 1609), fratello di Agostino. Fu, della sua famiglia, l'ingegno più fecondo e più vivo. Nelle prime opere si notano influssi di B. Cesi, di O. Samacchini, di P. Fontana.
A Parma studiò il Correggio, a Venezia il Veronese e i Bassano. Nel 1582 fondò a Bologna, con Agostino, l'Accademia dei Desiderosi, detta poi degli Incamminati, con lo scopo di ricondurre la pittura, fuori delle angustie del manierismo, all'esempio dei grandi maestri del sec. 16º.
Nelle opere di questo periodo si matura un'interpretazione profondamente classica della natura, eppur vivamente commossa e mediata attraverso la pittura del Cinquecento; rielaborando varie ascendenze culturali, il Carracci giunge progressivamente a una chiara definizione del suo ideale classico e naturalista nello stesso tempo.

In seguito (1582-94) lavorò, con l'aiuto di Agostino e del cugino Ludovico, alla decorazione dei palazzi Fava, Magnani e Sampieri, ed eseguì molte pale d'altare per chiese bolognesi. Nel 1595 si recò a Roma per decorare con scene mitologiche la galleria di palazzo Farnese.
A contatto con l'opera di Raffaello e l'arte antica, il Carracci elaborò le grandi composizioni con semplicità classica e libertà inventiva, perseguendo un'armoniosa sintesi tra mondo naturale empirico e tradizione classica.
Durante questo periodo dipinse anche varî quadri più severi e concentrati (L'Assunzione, in S. Maria del Popolo; il Quo vadis?, ora nella Gall. Naz. di Londra; ecc.).

È stato troppo recisamente sottolineato il contrasto tra il classicismo eclettico di Carracci e l'anticlassicismo rigoristico del Caravaggio: in realtà ambedue si contrappongono recisamente al gusto manieristico ⎆, il primo proponendosi di restaurare il classicismo cinquecentesco, il secondo mirando a un totale rinnovamento dei contenuti e forme dell'arte. Enorme fu la sua influenza in Italia e fuori. | © Enciclopedia Treccani