Spaightwood Galleries

From their studio, the Italian brothers Annibale (1560-1609) and Agostino Carracci (1557-1602), with their cousin Ludovico (1555-1619), produced art that greatly influenced European painting and drawing of the 17th and 18th centuries. Through their study of nature and the art of Correggio, Titian, and Veronese, they rejected the mannered approaches of contemporaries and laid the foundation for the development of Baroque art. Though many drawings were studies in preparation for painting commissions, they drew everything they observed more extensively than previous generations of artists: people, animals, landscapes, and everyday life scenes. They studied these drawings and students in the Academy they founded studied them. Their drawings influenced the great English architect, Inigo Jones, and Carracci drawings entered England's Royal Collection as early as the 1700s.

As Nicholas Turner writes in his lengthy essay on Ludovico in the Grove Dictionary of Art (3, 849-56), "The Carracci's artistic reform was rooted in a profound disaffection with current Mannerist practice and an equally deep commitment to north Italian naturalism and colore. In order to escape the sterility of maniera, they turned to the study of nature on the one had and of the paintings of non-Mannerist artists such as Corregio, Titian, and Veronese on the other. Incorporating elements of these masters' stules into their own works, they sought to combine truth to nature with a direct appeal to the beholder's sentiments. Within a decade, they overcame initial oppostion to their new style and were acknowledged as the leading artists in Bologna." After Annibable and Agostino left for Rome to work for the Farnese family, Ludovico was the leading recipient of commissions for altarpieces and frescoes in Bologna for the next 10 years until Guido Reni began challenging him by underbidding him by as much as 50%.

We will be adding illustrations of engravings by Annibale and Agostino as soon as time permits.

Selected Bibliographty:
Diane DeGrazia Bohlin, Prints and related drawings by the Carracci Family. A catalogue raisonne (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 2000); Babette Bohn, Ludovico Carracci And The Art Of Drawing (Harvey Miller Publishers, 2005); Alessandro Brogi, Ludovico Carracci 1555-1619 (2 vol.; Bologna: Ediz.Tipoarte 2001); Andrea Emiliani, Le storie di Romolo e Remo di Ludovico Agostino e Annibale Carracci in Palazzo Magnani a Bologna (Padova, 1989); Andrea Emiliani, Ludovico Carracci (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1993; English edition, with essay and catalogue by Gail Feigenbaum published Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, 1994); Carl Goldstein, Visual Fact over Verbal Fiction. A Study of the Carracci and the Criticism, Theory, & Practice of Art in Renaissance & Baroque Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990);  Diane De Grazia, Corregio and His Legacy: Sixteenth-Century Emilian Drawings (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1984); Catherine Loisel, Louvre Drawing Library: Ludovico Carracci (Milano: Five Continents, 2004); Emilio Negro e Massimo Pirondini, ed. La Scuola dei Carracci dall'Accademia alla Bottega di Ludovico (Modena: Poligrafico Artioli 1994); Donald Posner, Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform of Italian Painting around 1590, 2 vols. (NY: Phaidon, 1971); Clare Robertson and Catherine Whistler, Drawings by the Carracci from British Collections (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1996).