Annibale Carracci
The academic reformer of the Baroque.
Annibale Carracci founded a school of painting in Bologna and painted the ceiling of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. He combined the clarity of the Renaissance with new energy.
Annibale Carracci was born in Bologna in 1560 into a family of craftsmen. He learned to paint together with his elder brother Agostino and his cousin Ludovico. Around 1582 the three founded an academy in Bologna, where pupils drew from the live model and studied the old masters. They wanted to renew painting, which they felt had become artificial under Mannerism.
Annibale's early works are unusually down to earth. The Butcher's Shop, now in Oxford, and The Bean Eater, now in the Galleria Colonna in Rome, show ordinary people in everyday situations. At the same time he painted large altarpieces in which he combined Correggio's softness and Venetian colour with Raphael's clear compositions. Together with Agostino and Ludovico he also decorated palaces in Bologna with frescoes.
In 1595 he moved to Rome at the invitation of Cardinal Odoardo Farnese. His masterpiece is the ceiling paintings in the gallery of the Palazzo Farnese, made around 1597–1601. The theme is the loves of the gods, and the ceiling is filled with mythological scenes in painted frames, nude figures and illusionistic sculptures. Everything is held together by a strong sense of order. The gallery became one of the most important models of the Baroque, and artists came to study it for several hundred years. The palace is now the French Embassy.
Annibale also laid the foundations of the so-called ideal landscape, in which nature is ordered and harmonious and the people are small. A well-known example is The Flight into Egypt in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome. However, he was poorly paid for his work in the Palazzo Farnese and afterwards fell into a deep depression. From around 1605 he painted almost nothing. He died in Rome in 1609 and was buried in the Pantheon, near Raphael.
Through his pupils, among them Domenichino and Francesco Albani, he shaped classical Baroque painting. His ideal landscapes led on to Poussin and Claude Lorrain.