Annibale Carracci

“ It should not, however, be forgotten, that the best works of Guercino, the later pictures of Annibale Carracci, and the important works of Domenichino and Salvator Rosa belong to this period.
The second school was that of the Naturalists, who professed to study Nature alone, representing with brutal realism her repulsive aspects. Naples was the centre of these painters, and the poisoning of Domenichino and many other dark and terrible deeds have been attributed to them. ”

“ Old Count Fuscaldo represents Naples as winter represents spring. He has a great cardboard placard on which he studies, through his spectacles, not the rose-fields of Pæstum, but the names of suspicious foreigners to whose passports he must not put his visa. I envy him his palace (the Farnese) , an admirable unfinished structure, crowned by Michael Angelo, painted by Annibale Carracci, aided by his brother Agostino, and sheltering under its portico the sarcophagus of Cæcilia Metella, who has lost nothing by the change of mausoleum. Fuscaldo, ragged in mind and body, is said to have a mistress. ”

“ In his youth he was nicknamed "the ox," partly from his slowness, but possibly also for his study of long-forgotten methods, by which he arrived at the decision that reform was necessary to counteract the independence of the mannerists. He therefore obtained the assistance of his two nephews, Agostino and Annibale Carracci, sons of a tailor, and in concert with them opened an academy at Bologna in 1589. This he furnished with casts, drawings, and engravings, and provided living models and gave instruction in perspective, anatomy, etc. ”

“ Whilst M. Agnolo was doomed to live and brood over the perversion of his style, death prevented Raffaello from witnessing the gradual decay of his.
Such was the state of style, when, toward [35] the decline of the sixteenth century, Lodovico Carracci, with his cousins Agostino and Annibale, founded at Bologna, on the hints caught from Pellegrino Tibaldi, that Eclectic School which, by selecting the beauties, correcting the faults, supplying the defects, and avoiding the extremes of the different styles, attempted to form a perfect system. ”

“ Jerome" in the Academy at Bologna. His prints are numerous; his engraving of Tintoretto's "Crucifixion," executed at Venice in 1589, was highly praised by that artist. In the same year Agostino returned to Bologna, and became the principal teacher in the school of the Carracci. He afterwards went to Rome to assist Annibale in the frescoes for the Farnese Palace. He executed the "Cephalus and Aurora" and "Galatea" in that series; his success excited the jealousy of Annibale, and caused a feud between the two brothers. Agostino thereupon left Rome for Parma, where he died shortly afterwards. ”

“ Angelo, grand and majestic like his own Moses, and a brow worthy of the conception of that great St. Peter’s—the temple of the Christian world. Murillo, glorifying in his aspect the stolid simplicity of that humble life whence he drew his origin, and the delineation of which he made peculiarly the subject of his design. Carracci, with that forsaken look when the child of genius, like, alas! too many of his calling, lay down to die of a broken heart. ”

“ The Carracci were needed at the end of the century, if not to snatch Italian art from inevitable death, at least to lend it, emerging from its follies and delusions, an air of dignity and a cold distinction in which it could veil itself to die. ”

“ Idealism, or sentimentalism, was a general mannerism of the seventeenth century; and was, apparently, one of the ill effects of the spirit of eclecticism developed by the Carracci.
It remains yet to explain the special destination of this Table and Catalogue, as a companion or hand-book to Italian picture galleries. The work is so, of course, only generally, as supplying general information concerning Italian painting. It may be made serviceable wherever Italian paintings are to be found, whether in or out of Italy. ”

“ The forms of the saint in Carracci are grander and more ideal than in the saint of Domenichino, some have even thought them too vigorous: both, in my opinion are in harmony with the emotion of the face and expression of either. The eagerness that animates the countenance of the one may be supposed to spread a momentary vigour over his frame. The mental dereliction of countenance in the other with equal propriety relaxes and palsies the limbs which depend on it. ”

“ His most famous picture, the Communion of S. Jerome, now in the Vatican, is closely imitated from Agostino Carracci's.
Guido Reni (1575-1642) , even more popular in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than Domenichino, was as skilful in some respects, but hardly as admirable. The Ecce Homo, bequeathed by Samuel Rogers to the National Gallery, is an excellent example of his ability to charm the sentimentalist, and if ever there should be a popular revival of taste in the direction of the now neglected school of the Carracci, he will possibly resume all the honour formerly paid to him. ”

“ Nowhere else can these men, the Carracci, be studied as here in Bologna, where they founded their art-school just at the close of the sixteenth century. There are also some very good examples of the work of Domenichino, Guido Reni, Albani, and other famous pupils of the Carracci. You saw fine frescoes by Domenichino and Guido Reni in Rome and Naples, and I am sure you remember perfectly Domenichino's Communion of St. Jerome in the Vatican Gallery. ”

“ It is said that in painting one of the executioners the artist actually wrought himself into a passion, using threatening words and actions, and that Annibale Caracci, surprising him at that moment, embraced him, exclaiming with joy, ‘To-day, my dear Domenichino, thou art teaching me.’ So novel, and at the same time so natural, it appeared to him that the artist, like the orator, should feel within himself all that he is representing to others. ”

“ They aimed to unite such a style as Correggio's—who belonged to no school—with that of the severely mannered artists of the preceding centuries. These artists were called Eclectics, and the Bolognese school of the Carracci was the most important centre of the movement, while Domenichino, a native of Bologna—1581-1631—was the most distinguished painter of the school. ”

“ Of Guido, there are ten pictures, particularly that extraordinary one, called Ninus and Semiramis, life size. Of the Carracci, at least eight or nine, particularly the genius of Fame, which should be compared with that of Guido. There are numerous pictures of Albano and Ribera; but very few specimens of Salvator Rosa and Domenichino.
On the whole, I suppose that no gallery, except that of Florence, can compete with the Dresden gallery in the treasures of Italian art. In all, [171] there are five hundred and thirty-four Italian pictures. ”

“ But that is merely because we no longer share what was an entirely sincere way of religious feeling. They started an Academy in which the antique, the nude, and competitive composition were the staple of instruction quite as in French and British State art schools today. In the Bolognese palaces the Carracci did in fresco great mythological series, consulting Homer, Virgil and Ovid and Apollonius of Rhodes. In the main they had friezes to do, and they drew heavily from Correggio, tempering his alacrity with something of the heavier energy of the Roman style. ”

“ In the falling away of the schools of Italy, and especially of the followers of Michael Angelo and Raphael, into mannerism and exaggeration, fitly expressed in delineation of heathen gods and goddesses, there arose a cluster of painters in the North of Italy who had considerable influence on art.
The Carracci included a group of painters, the founders of the later Bolognese School. Lodovico, the elder of the three, was born at Bologna, 1555. He was educated as a painter, and was so slow in his education, that he received from his fellow-scholars the nickname of 'Il Bue' (the ox) . ”

“ The seeds of mediocrity which the Carracci had attempted to scatter over Italy, found a more benign soil, and reared an abundant harvest in France: to mix up a compound from something of every excellence in the catalogue of art, was the principle of their theory and their aim in execution. ”

“ Correggio was one of that splendid triumvirate of painters who, living at the same time, were working on different principles, and achieving, each in his own department, excellence hitherto unequalled; and if Correggio must be allowed to be inferior to Raffaelle in invention and expression, and to Titian in life-like color, he has united design and color with the illusion of light and shadow in a degree of perfection not then nor since approached by any painter. Hence Annibale Caracci, on seeing one of his great pictures, exclaimed in a transport that he was “the only painter!” ”

“ Agostino Carracci, cousin of Lodovico, was born at Bologna in 1559. His father was a tailor, and Agostino himself began life as a jeweller. He became a painter and an engraver in turn, devoting himself chiefly to engraving. ”

“ A Carracci embraced a kindred genius for what a Le Clerc or a Selden would have ridiculed.
Poets, I confess, frequently indulge reveries, which, though they offer no charms to their friends, are too delicious to forego. In the ideal world, peopled with all its fairy inhabitants, and ever open to their contemplation, they travel with an unwearied foot. Crebillon, the celebrated tragic poet, was enamoured of solitude, that he might there indulge, without interruption, in those fine romances with which his imagination teemed. ”

“ The modern Italian painter frets himself to the full as much as his predecessor did—if the truth were known, probably a great deal more. It does not lie in want of schooling or art education. For p. 147the last three hundred years, ever since the Carracci opened their academy at Bologna, there has been no lack of art education in Italy. Curiously enough, the date of the opening of the Bolognese Academy coincides as nearly as may be with the complete decadence of Italian painting. ”

“ Of Correggio's numerous pretending imitators, Lodovico Carracci appears to be the only one who penetrated his principle. The axiom, that the less the traces appear of the means by which a work has been produced, the more it resembles the operations of Nature, is not an axiom likely to spring from the infancy of art. The even colour, veiled splendour, the solemn twilight; that tone of devotion and cloistered meditation, which Lodovico Carracci spread over his works, could arise only from the contemplation of some preceding style, analogous to his own feelings and its comparison with Nature ”

“ After the middle of the sixteenth century, the flame-like rapidity of Tintoretto's style at Venice, and soon after, the powerful contrast of Caravaggio's method at Rome, and the eclectic system of the Carracci, at Bologna, spread general emulation over Italy, and divided Naples into three parties, of nearly equal strength, led by Corenzio, Ribera, and Caracciolo, differing from each other, but ready to unite against all foreign competition. ”

“ On his return to Bologna he quickly took the leading place as an artist, and to him were due the great improvements in the general style of what has been called the Bolognese school. His works were considered to be inferior in point of design to some other productions of the school of Raffaelle, but they were distinguished by rich colouring and graceful delineation. They were highly esteemed by Guido and the Carracci, who studied them carefully and in some points imitated them. The best specimens of Bagnacavallo s works, the Dispute of St Augustin and a Madonna, irith Child, are at Bologna. ”

“ But the most serious blow the mannerists received, was from the Caracci and their school. Annibale arrived in Rome not much before the year 1600, invited by the Cardinal Farnese to paint his gallery; a work which occupied him for nearly eight years, and for which he received only five hundred scudi, a sum so inadequate that we can scarcely believe it to be correct. He also decorated several churches. Lodovico, his cousin, was with him for a short time ”

“ But Annibale Caracci, who observed his faculties with more attention, predicted that the apparent slowness of Domenichino’s genius would in time produce what would be an honour to the art of painting. When his early productions had brought him into notice, he studied with extreme application, and made such advance as to raise his works into a comparison with those of the most admired masters of the time. ”

“ And were the Carracci such? separate the precept from the practice, the artist from the teacher; and the Carracci are in possession of my submissive homage. Lodovico, far from implicitly subscribing to a master’s dictates, was the sworn pupil of nature. To a modest style of form, to a simplicity eminently fitted for those subjects of religious gravity which his taste preferred, he joined that solemnity of hue, that sober twilight, the air of cloistered meditation, which you have so often heard recommended as the proper tone of historic [82] colour. ”

“ The persons delineated could not tell their tale to the ear more plainly than they speak it to the eye. The ‘Scourging of St Andrew,’ which he executed in competition with Guido Reni at Rome (a fresco in the church of San Gregorio) , is a powerful illustration of this truthful expression. Of the two works of these masters, Annibale Caracci preferred that of Domenichino. ”