Agostino Carracci

For more information on Carracci family, visit Britannica.com.

(b Bologna, 15 Aug 1557; d Parma, 22 March 1602). Painter, engraver and draughtsman, cousin of (1) Ludovico Carracci. He abandoned his profession as a tailor, which was also that of his father, Antonio, and began training as a painter. According to Faberi, he studied first in the workshop of the painter Prospero Fontana (like Ludovico), then trained under the engraver and architect Domenico Tibaldi and under the sculptor Alessandro Menganti (1531-c. 1594). However, it is likely that Faberi's account was influenced by his desire to present Agostino's career as an example of the versatile 'cursus studiorum' advocated by the Accademia degli Incamminati. Other sources (Mancini, Malvasia, Bellori) agree that it was his cousin Ludovico who was responsible for directing him towards painting. Only recently has it been assumed that he was a pupil of Bartolomeo Passarotti.

Part of the Carracci family

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The Italian painters and engravers Ludovico (1555-1619), Agostino (1557-1602), and Annibale (1560-1609) Carracci opposed the style of late mannerist painting and sought instead classically inspired realism. The style they created is called baroque classicism.

What the Carracci urged was a change from the artificial, antinaturalistic style then in vogue and a return to the realism, the richness, and in some cases the monumentality of the High Renaissance. This meant turning to examples of the work not only of Raphael, as is sometimes supposed, but of Titian, Correggio, and Michelangelo as well.

The movement began in Bologna. There is no doubt that Ludovico was the leader in the beginning. For a time he shared a studio with his cousins, the brothers Agostino and Annibale. Together they founded an art school or academy (the Accademia degli Incamminati) where their artistic principles were so convincing and their example so persuasive that they determined the course of Bolognese art throughout the following century.

Ludovico Carracci

Ludovico, who was baptized in Bologna on April 21, 1555, and remained there all his life, is most closely related to the northern Italian tradition. His Madonna of the Scalzi (ca. 1593), generally considered his masterpiece, takes both St. Jerome and the Christ Child from Correggio's Madonna of St. Jerome and the facial type of the Virgin from Veronese. In the interrelationship of the figures, however, we find a new intimacy that will come to be associated with the baroque. This intimacy is still more marked in the Holy Family with St. Francis (1591), where passages of deep color and white highlights in the Venetian manner are used in combination with unexpectedly deep shadows to create an effect that is still closer to pure baroque. Ludovico died in Bologna on Nov. 3, 1619.

Agostino Carracci

Agostino, who was baptized in Bologna on Aug. 16, 1557, is best known for his engravings. His most famous painting, the Last Communion of St. Jerome (ca. 1592), served as an inspiration for works by Domenichino and Peter Paul Rubens. Agostino was also a theoretician and a fine teacher, and he trained some of the better-known graduates of the Carracci school. He was working on the frescoes in the Palazzo del Giardino in Parma when he died on Feb. 23, 1602.

Annibale Carracci

Annibale, born in Bologna on Nov. 3, 1560, was the genius of the family, but he was slow to develop. His Virgin with St. John and St. Catherine (1593) repeats a whole series of High Renaissance formulas. The Madonna sits on a high throne with a saint on either side; together they form a symmetrical triangle. In the background a central niche and flanking columns provide tectonic stability. The gentle turning of the saints' bodies supplies just enough movement to loosen the composition a little. The pose of the Christ Child comes from Raphael, the relief on the pedestal from Correggio, and the facial types from Veronese. Paintings such as this, which are typical of Annibale's activity in Bologna, tell us much about his classicism but little about his originality.

In Rome, where he moved in 1595, Annibale's works took on a new inventiveness and monumentality. Under the impact of his intensive study of ancient sculpture and Raphael's frescoes his style became harder and tighter. At the same time he brought his figures close to the surface of the painting so as to give them immediacy and largeness of scale. In his Domine, quo vadis? (ca. 1600) Christ appears as a powerful, seminude athlete. With the cross borne lightly on his shoulder, he strides forward past an amazed St. Peter and on toward us as if he were about to break out of the canvas. Annibale's pictures are now filled with classical details, such as columns and temples, and his figures are rich in dignity. But there is also a preference for strong movement and a new sense of drama that belongs to the new age. Works such as this, which fuse two diverse stylistic currents, are apt examples of baroque classicism.

Annibale's masterpiece is in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. He covered the ceiling of the great gallery with frescoes (1597-1604) that imitate framed easel paintings, bronze reliefs, marble statues, entablatures, balustrades, fruits, flowers, ox skulls, shells, masks - all crowding and overlapping one another in a kaleidoscopic display of lavishness that has few, if any, equals. Individual scenes, drawn from Greek and Roman mythology, are filled with the exuberant rhythms of Hellenistic sculpture. Many artists of the high baroque, among them Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Rubens, and Pietro da Cortona, turned for inspiration to this famous monument of 17th-century classicism.

Annibale's classicism is equally apparent in his landscapes. In his Flight into Egypt (ca. 1603) nothing is accidental. The eye is carried back into space along planes parallel to the surface. These are joined by connecting diagonals. A cluster of low stone buildings at the center of the picture intensifies the painting's underlying geometry. This is not ordinary nature but what is called paysage composé, or classical landscape, in which nature is shaped and modified by the hand and mind of man. Annibale's bold new concept of nature underlies the elaborations of Nicolas Poussin, which in turn provided a springboard for Camille Corot and Paul Cézanne.

In the last years of his life Annibale suffered a nervous collapse and, in the words of Bellori (1672), "was compelled to leave aside the brushes that melancholy had taken from his fingers." He must have suffered deeply, for his art was his whole life. "He was never avaricious or mean in regard to money," Bellori wrote. "Indeed, he appreciated it too little and kept it openly in his painting box so that anyone could dig their hand in it at will. He despised ostentation in people as well as in painting and sought the company of plain, ambitionless men. Thus he used to live shut up in his rooms with his pupils, spending hours at painting, which he was wont to call his lady." Annibale died in Rome on July 15, 1609.

Further Reading

Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600-1750 (1958; 2d ed. 1965), and Ellis K. Waterhouse, Italian Baroque Painting (1962), contain excellent studies of the Carracci and their work. See also Giovanni P. Bellori's fundamental work, The Lives of Annibale and Agostino Carracci (1672; trans. 1968).

Carracci Family (Annibale, 1560–1609; Agostino, 1557–1602; Ludovico, 1555–1619), Italian painters. The careers of the Carracci family of painters from Bologna—the brothers Annibale and Agostino, and their elder cousin Ludovico, straddled the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries both chronologically and stylistically. Among the first generation of artists to come of age after Giorgio Vasari had published his history of Italian art, the Carracci were intensely conscious of their own positions within the stylistic progressions, local traditions, and pantheon of great painters set forth by Vasari. Collectively the Carracci are best known for reforming the tenets of painting, rejecting the frigid artificiality of late mannerism prevalent in Bologna, and introducing into their art emotional warmth and freedom of handling, a dynamic and nuanced treatment of light and color, as well as a commitment to direct observation of nature. They are credited with joining the previously immiscible qualities of light and color characteristic of northern Italian painting with the firmness of design and precision of drawing found in central Italian art.

The earliest years of the Carracci are poorly documented. Their biographers, the Bolognese Carlo Cesare Malvasia and the Roman Giovanni Pietro Bellori, are rich, but not unbiased, sources. In the early 1580s all three Carracci traveled to Parma and Venice, and Ludovico also visited Florence. By 1583 the Carracci had set up a workshop headed by Ludovico. Remarkably, they also established an academy in their quarters, first called the Accademia dei Desiderosi ('desirous of learning and achievement'), and later the Accademia degli Incamminati ('those who were on the way'). Although it was a private family academy, and operated rather informally, it was constituted with a serious pedagogical program and a commitment to the theory as well as practice of art. An emphasis on drawing from life was complemented by the study of optics, perspective, and anatomy. Incubated in the academy were new conceptions of genre painting, exemplified by Annibale's broadly painted, caught-in-midaction Bean Eater (Rome, Colonna Gallery), and landscape painting, the latter fueled by drawings done on the spot, out-of-doors. Caricature is purported to have been invented by Annibale, and practiced in the academy, but the best surviving examples are by Agostino. While Agostino had first specialized as an engraver, and his production as a printmaker is important and extensive, he subsequently joined his family in their collective enterprise.

The young Carracci collaborated on numerous projects in Bologna, most notably the frescoed friezes of the story of Jason in the Palazzo Fava, about 1593, and the founding of Rome in the Palazzo Magnani, about 1590. When asked who had done each scene, the Carracci, having freely traded ideas and sketches, and having worked elbow to elbow, are claimed to have responded, "Ella e dei Carracci; L'abbiam fatto tutti noi" (It is by the Carracci, we did it together). Such intimate collaboration, in which the individual style was sublimated in favor of a seamless, lively, and highly illusionistic effect, is characteristic of the Carraccis' early period. During this time each of the Carracci also painted several major altarpieces that opened the way for the baroque style of painting in northern Italy, among them Annibale's Baptism of Christ (Parma), Agostino's Last Communion of St. Jerome (Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna), and Ludovico's Vision of St. Hyacinth (Louvre).

In 1595 Annibale moved to Rome, answering a request from Cardinal Odoardo Farnese for the Carracci to decorate his immense family palace. Agostino later joined his brother in the execution of Annibale's greatest project, the frescoed vault of the Farnese Gallery. Annibale's vivid evocation of a picture gallery on the theme of the loves of the gods is populated with nudes and classical statues come to life, and its architectural illusionism is irresistible. If its patron, Cardinal Farnese, failed to appreciate it fully, the ceiling nevertheless became one of the most highly esteemed works of art in Italy. Annibale had developed an unsurpassed ability to draw the human figure, a skill enhanced in the Farnese by a new monumentality derived from his study of Raphael, Michelangelo, and the antique statuary newly available to him in Rome. Blossoming about 1600, Annibale's new synthesis proved the most compelling and enduring model for the entire century of Italian painting to follow. In his last years Annibale's mental state deteriorated, hindering his productivity, but he continued to create powerful works in an austere and tragic key, often assisted by his devoted pupils Francesco Albani, Domenichino, and Sisto Badalocchio. Agostino, whose talents also included music and poetry, and who, unlike Annibale, enjoyed court society, spent his last years on the fresco decoration of Duke Ranuccio Farnese's Palazzo del Giardino in Parma. His natural son Antonio Carracci (1583?–1618) became a successful painter in Rome.

Ludovico, who remained in Bologna, was devoted to his teaching and to fostering a school of painting that would be the glory of Bologna. It was not by chance that his most important project, the painted cloister of San Michele in Bosco (ruined) was a showcase for the collaborative achievements of the family academy. Guido Reni, Domenichino, Francesco Albani, and Alessandro Algardi were among the major artists who passed through the academy, ensuring its place as the cradle of Italian baroque painting. Noted for his compositional and iconographic inventiveness, Ludovico's commitment to the naturalism of the early academy waned, and he had little use for Annibale's Roman classicistidealist idiom. Ludovico exploited the expressive effects of anatomical distortion and created images of intense and often irrational emotionalism. The sweet, diminutive figures of his earliest work gave way to an aggressive plasticity of forms deployed in dynamic compositions. His work grew ever more dramatic as he experimented with broken patterns of light and dark, and with what has been called his meteorological chiaroscuro. Ludovico's mature altarpieces filled the churches of Bologna and the surrounding region, eventually carrying the Carracci innovations throughout Italy.

Bibliography

Bellori, Giovanni Pietro. Le vite de' pittori, scultori et architetti moderni. Rome, 1672.

Benati, Daniele, et al. The Drawings of Annibale Carracci. Exh. cat. Washington, D.C., 1999.

De Grazia, Diane. Prints and Related Drawings by the Carracci Family: A Catalogue Raisonné. Washington, D.C., 1979.

Malvasia, Carlo Cesare, Conte. Malvasia's Life of the Carracci. Translated by Anne Summerscale. University Park, Pa., 2000. Translation of Di Lodovico, Agostino, et Annibale Carracci. Ludovico Carracci. Edited by Andrea Emiliani. Milan, New York, and Fort Worth, 1994.

Posner, Donald. Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform of Italian Painting around 1590. London and New York, 1971.

—GAIL FEIGENBAUM

Head of a Faun (c. 1595) 181 x 187 mm
Pen and brown ink on laid paper
National Gallery of Art, Washington.

The Communion of St. Jerome (1592).
Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Agostino Carracci

Agostino Carracci (or Caracci) (August 16, 1557 – March 22, 1602) was an Italian painter and printmaker. He was the brother of the more famous Annibale and cousin of Lodovico Carracci.

He posited the ideal in nature, and was the founder of the competing school to the more gritty (for lack of a better term) view of nature as expressed by Caravaggio. He was, along with his brothers, one of the founders of the Accademia degli Incamminati, which helped propel painters of the School of Bologna to prominence.

Life

Agostino Carracci was born in Bologna, and trained at the workshop of the architect Domenico Tibaldi. Starting from 1574 he worked as a reproductive engraver, copying works of 16th century masters such as Federico Barocci, Tintoretto, Antonio Campi, Veronese and Correggio. He also produced some original prints, including two etchings.

He travelled to Venice (1582, 1587–1589) and Parma (1586–1587). Together with Annibale and Ludovico he worked in Bologna on the fresco cycles in Palazzo Fava (Histories of Jason and Medea, 1584) and Palazzo Magnani (Histories of Romulus, 1590–1592). In 1592 he also painted the Communion of St. Jerome, now in the Pinacoteca di Bologna and considered his masterwork. From 1586 is his altarpiece of the Madonna with Child and Saints, in the National Gallery of Parma.

In 1598 Carracci joined his brother Annibale in Rome, to collaborate on the decoration of the Gallery in Palazzo Farnese. From 1598–1600 is a triple Portrait, now in Naples, an example of genre painting.

In 1600 he was called to Parma by Duke Ranuccio I Farnese to began the decoration of the Palazzo del Giardino, but he died before it was finished.

Agostino's son Antonio Carracci was also a painter, and attempted to compete with his father's Academy.

Works

• Head of a Faun in a Concave (drawing in roundel, c. 1595, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC)
• The Penitent Magdalen (Private collection)
• The Annunciation , Musée du Louvre, Paris [1]
• The Lamentation , Hermitage, St. Petersburg[2]
• Erotic work

External links

• Catholic Encyclopedia: Carracci

This article about an Italian painter born in the 16th century is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v • d • e

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)