Three related Italian painters who represent an important phase of late-Renaissance art, Lodovico Carracci and his cousins (who were brothers) Agostino and Annibale. Lodovico (b. 1555; d. 1619), pupil of Prospero Fontana and in the school of Passignano at Florence, was an artist of scholarly inclination who made an extensive study of Renaissance masters, especially of Correggio and Titian. Agostino (b. 1557; d. 1602), painter and engraver, also studied under Fontana and in Parma and Venice. Annibale (b. 1560; d. 1609) was the most original artist of the three. He studied Correggio’s work and was an excellent draftsman (drawing from the life being one of the Carraccis’ tenets).
Lodovico was the founder of the famous academy at Bologna (both a teaching school and a center of learned study), 1585, in which he enlisted the aid of his cousins. From 1600 he carried it on alone. Albani, Domenichino, Guido Reni, Guercino and Lanfranco were among the Carraccis' distinguished pupils. Agostino took a leading place in the Bologna academy and in directing its policy, which required, not the piecemeal assemblage of various excellences in celebrated masters, but intelligent study, especially of Correggio and the Venetians, designed to counteract a facile Mannerism. He worked with his brother on the decorations commissioned by Cardinal Odoardo Farnese for the Farnese Palace in Rome, 1595–97, moving to Parma in 1600. Annibale's principal work was the decoration of the Farnese Palace, the Loves of the Gods being the theme of the paintings in its gallery, exuberant in movement, and with a light-hearted approach to the mythological subject. The idealism of the Carracci did not exclude humor or an elem
ent of caricature.
With its two compositions by Domenichino of the legend of Perseus, the Farnese Gallery served as a model for the French painter decorators of the 17th century under Le Brun. In religious painting, Annibale may be thought less inspired and more conventional in the attempt to convey the pious spirit prescribed by the Counter-Reformation. In landscape, however, he was an originator, and one can trace to him the “classical” landscape with ruins developed by Claude and Poussin. His work and that of the Bolognese School as a whole have risen in estimation as a prelude to the age of Baroque.