Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Ludovico Carracci of Bologna as Mentor and Exemplar

Ludovico Carracci
Holy Family with St Francis and Donors
1591
oil on canvas
Museo Civico, Cento 

In 1678 a two-volume work called Felsina pittrice was published in Bologna. Carlo Cesare Malvasia (1616-1693) wrote the book to celebrate the lives and careers of contemporary Bolognese painters. The longest section was his Life of the Carracci, an heroic triple-biography of brothers Agostino (1557-1602) and Annibale (1560-1609), along with their older cousin Ludovico (1555-1619). Together, the three founded the Accademia degli Incamminati in Bologna in1582, attracting crowds of students and followers. Agostino and Annibale moved regularly between Bologna and Rome, where their celebrity became extravagant. Despite his cousins' star-status, Ludovico proved unwilling to leave Bologna, preferring to paint frescoes and altarpieces for local palaces and churches and to oversee the family academy. His personal influence bore heavily on (among others, according to Malvasia) a poor and ambitious local youth named Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1597-1666) who would in the new century  under the trade-name of Il Guercino  stand equal in fame as a painter with the Carracci themselves. Ludovico Carracci's Holy Family with St Francis and Donors (above) was painted in 1591 for the Piombini family chapel in the church of the Cappuccini in Cento, the northern Italian birthplace of Guercino. As Malvasia writes, "See the beautiful altarpiece in Cento, in the church of the Capuchin Fathers, the energy of its color having been the first inspiration and the only model (as Guercino himself has so often told me) for Guercino's use of color, so loved by everyone."  

Below then, a further group of influential works from the 1580s and 1590s by the provincial but nevertheless illustrious Ludovico Carracci, all of them works that Guercino could have seen as a young man


Ludovico Carracci
The Vision of St Francis of Assisi
1583-85
oil on canvas
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Ludovico Carracci
St Francis of Assisi in Meditation
early 1580s
oil on copper
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Ludovico Carracci
Assumption of the Virgin
1586-87
oil on canvas
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Ludovico Carracci
Madonna dei Bargellini
1588
oil on canvas
Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna

Ludovico Carracci
Study for The Flagellation
1580s
drawing
British Museum

Ludovico Carracci
The Flagellation
1580s
oil on canvas
Musée de la Chartreuse de Douai

Ludovico Carracci
The Flagellation
ca. 1595
oil on canvas
Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna

Ludovico Carracci
Apparition of the Virgin to St Hyacinth
1594
oil on canvas
Louvre

Ludovico Carracci
The Transfiguration
ca. 1595
oil on canvas
Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna

Ludovico Carracci
Martyrdom of St Ursula
1597
oil on canvas
Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna

Ludovico Carracci
St Peter in penitence
ca. 1595
oil on canvas
private collection

Ludovico Carracci
St Sebastian
1599
oil on canvas
Museo Fondazione Santomasi, Bari, Apulia

Anonymous Bolognese painter
Portrait of Annibale, Ludovico, and Agostino Carracci
17th century
oil on canvas
private collection

Malvasia's Life of the Carracci  translated and impressively annotated by Anne Summerscale  was published in 2000 by Pennsylvania State University Press.