GRAND SPRING AUCTION OF PRIVATE COLLECTIONS, LATIN AMERICAN ART AND FINE WATCHES
Lote 205:
Important oil painting on copper measuring 54 x 46 cm, dimensions with frame: 71 x 62 cm. Roman baroque Italian school from the 17th century. (Bologna, 1560-Rome, 1609). Italian painter and brother of Agostino and first cousin of Ludovico Carracci. He obtained his training first as an engraver with his brother Agostino and formed with him and his cousin, around 1582, the Desiderosi Academy, which later belonged to the Incamminati, with the intention of surpassing the received forms and enriching the training of artists. with the knowledge of literature and the study of nature forgotten by the cultivation of the manner. He soon set out on his own path as a painter, breaking in a very personal way with the mannerism predominant in Bologna and focusing on a naturalism of strong character, also visible in Bartolomeo Passarotti. The teachings of the Academy insisted on the convenience of drawing from life as a preparation for canvases, which is why many studies of nudes and popular figures, animals and domestic objects have been preserved, surprising for their vividness. It is also the Carracci, especially Annibale, who are the initiators of the caricature genre, which involves a careful observation of the most characteristic features of the individual human personality. However, in his religious or mythological compositions he expresses himself with a serenity that revives the classic models of the Renaissance but giving them a grandeur that announces the full baroque. Also in the oil technique he shows himself free in the Venetian way, sometimes using the brush with extreme ease. His early period corresponds to works such as The Butcher Shop (Christ Church, Oxford) or the Bean Dining Room (Galleria Colonna, Rome), dated around 1580. Between 1583 and 1584 he collaborated with his brother and cousin on the decoration of the Fava Palace in Bologna. , with frescoes of great elegance and color in the Venetian style. Trips to Parma and Venice acquainted him with Correggio and Titian who would exert a great influence on him. The most important works preserved by him in the Prado correspond to this moment: Venus and Adonis and Assumption of the Virgin. In 1595 he was called to Rome by Cardinal Odoardo Farnesio to decorate his palace. There, in contact with the work of Raphael and Michelangelo, he finishes maturing his style with the perfectly personal assimilation of everything he has seen and has been consonant with him. Accused of eclecticism by nineteenth-century critics, he is currently considered a true creator who has left models of sovereign beauty in his Roman works. The decoration of the gallery of the Farnese Palace (1597-1600), where – following Ovid – the loves of the gods are presented, in very noble compositions, constituted for a long time, the ideal model of beauty and classical harmony where it combines the most idyllic interpretation of the literary story with a precise observation of nature, from which not only his many disciples drank (Albani, Domenichino,Lanfranco, etc.), but even Rubens. At the same time, it develops a vision of the landscape that acquires importance and develops as a protagonist of the religious or profane anecdote that is presented in it (Flight into Egypt, Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome) within a spirit of solemn repose and delicate melancholy that will echo direct in Poussin and Claudio de Lorena. In his last years he was overcome by a serious depression that prevented him from painting, but the attention of his disciples and collaborators, working on his drawings and ideas, managed to carry out important fresco cycles, such as the one in the Herrera Chapel, in Santiago de los Spaniards from Rome with scenes from the life of Saint Diego de Alcalá and figures of saints (of which the Prado and the Museum of Barcelona keep important fragments) and devotional paintings of great emotional force and grandiose and severe composition (Piiedades in National Gallery, London ; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; and Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome). Reference bibliography: Mena Marqués, Manuela B., Italian drawings from the 17th century, «Prado Museum. Catalog of drawings», Madrid, Prado Museum, Ministry of Culture, 1983, t. VI, pp. 52-54; Cooney, Patrick J., and Malafarina, Gianfranco, L’opera Completa di Annibale Carracci, Milan, Rizzoli, 1976. Provenance: important private art gallery, Barcelona, Spain.
