AT THE GATES OF THE BAROQUE PAINTING – Annibale Carracci: a short season of art, imitating nature

ANNIBALE CARRACCI 1/3 – He, the son of a tailor, was born in Bologna in an autumn day in 1560, and his training takes place outside the family circle, though growing – professionally and humanely – with his brother Agostino and his cousin Ludovico. Coming out of the box of the late Mannerism, he proposed the recovery of Italian painting of the sixteenth century, managing to synthesize wonderfully creative nuances of Raphael and Michelangelo, Correggio, Titian and Veronese. The modernization of this great tradition and the imitation of nature, Caravaggio and Rubens, are the hinges of a door that opens on the Baroque painting. ANNIBALE CARRACCI 2/3 – Around 1588, his painting comes close to the Venetian painting style, with creative shades of Correggio and Veronese, which will – in the years who lived in Emilia – its major artistic landmarks. The “Charity of St. Rocco” (a painting made in 1595, now preserved in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden), is the largest painting he made, a work that closes its Emilian art season. The frescoes in Bologna, make it known to the Cardinal Farnese, who calls him to Rome (where his fame spread quickly), to decorate the main floor of Palazzo Farnese. Depicting the landscapes, he will almost match Titian. ANNIBALE CARRACCI 3/3 – His early landscape creations retain memories of the Venetian landscapes, but it is in Rome that he draw up a landscape that fascinates each of its shades, achieving an admirable balance between nature and the man who lives there, without transforming the elements in paesistici mere background but making them true subjects of visual representation. His first work of art, is an altarpiece painted in 1583 for a church in Bologna. In the day of his funeral, his is a different work of art (his Christ crowned with thorns), which summarizes, leaning on his body, a whole life dedicated to art. Visiting Rome, he is waiting for you in the Pantheon, next to the tomb of Raphael. You can see more on Meeting Benches, looking for: http://meetingbenches.com/2016/05/annibale-carracci-15601609-italian-painter-landscapes-portraits-and-altarpieces/