Monday, August 24, 2015

Samaria

Annibale Carracci
Christ & the Woman of Samaria
1596-97
Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, Budapest

Paintings by Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) – the most admired and successful European painter at the close of the 16th century. His stylish presentation of traditional figure-groupings both stimulated and reassured his patrons.

Annibale Carracci
Assumption of the Virgin
1587
Prado

Annibale Carracci
Crucifixion
1583
Santa Maria della Carità, Bologna

Annibale Carracci
Women at the Tomb
1590s
State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

Annibale Carracci
Temptation of St. Anthony Abbot
1597-98
National Gallery, London

Annibale Carracci
Venus, Adonis & Cupid
c. 1590
Prado

Annibale's popularity gained him the richest commissions of his generation. From 1597 to 1601 he designed and led his workshop in executing a series of fresco decorations at Palazzo Farnese in Rome (below). The scale and ambition of the scheme deliberately invited comparison with Michelangelo's ceiling across the river at the Vatican.

Annibale Carracci
Ceiling frescoes
1597-1601
Farnese Gallery, Rome

Anninbale Carracce
Ceiling frescoes
1597-1601
Farnese Gallery, Rome

Annibale Carracci
Mercury & Paris
1597-1601
Farnese Gallery, Rome

Simultaneously, Annibale was devising idealized landscapes on the easel. Pictures like Rest on the Flight into Egypt (below)  with its intricate organization of receding planes populated to scale by groups of figures in receding sizes  became an acknowledged model for the mid-century school of Roman landscape masters led by Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain.

Annibale Carracci
Landscape with the Flight into Egypt
c. 1603-04
Galleria Doria Pamphilij, Rome

Annibale Carracci
Landscape with Bathers
c. 1600
Prado

Annibale's cousin Lodovico Carracci (1555-1619) remained in Bologna supervising the family art academy. Lodovico never developed a reputation to compare with his superstar relatives. Even today his paintings (like the St. Margaret, below) are more likely to be found in the churches for which they were created than in art museums.

Lodovico Carracci
Martyrdom of St. Margaret
1616
San Maurizio, Mantua

Lodovico Carracci
Vision of St. Francis - the Madonna, Christ and St. John the Baptist
c. 1601-03
Prado

Annibale's older brother Agostino Carracci (1557-1602) cooperated on major corporate projects in Bologna and Rome, but concentrated on independent commissions. His landscapes (as below) were not forward-looking like Annibale's but instead relied on the old-fashioned glamour of Leonardo's blue & distant mountains.

Agostino Carracci
Landscape with Bathers
c. 1597-99
Palazzo Pitti, Florence

Agostino Carracci
Last Supper
c. 1593-94
Prado