Description:
The first English biography of the influential sixteenth-century Italian painter.
In late sixteenth-century Bologna, Annibale Carracci reinvigorated painting through a renewed study of nature in vivid depictions of a bean-eater and butchers and moving religious images. In Rome, Annibale painted the exuberant loves of the gods in the Farnese Gallery--frescoes comparable to Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel and Raphael's Villa Farnesina--which catapulted him to fame as a new Raphael. He was celebrated as a man of wit and a devoted teacher. This first modern biography in English highlights Annibale's incisive pictorial and verbal wit and the shifts in taste that later obscured his legacy. Reassessing his art with clarity and nuance, the book brings into focus a painter of remarkable breadth and intelligence who profoundly shaped European art.
Brief description:
F. M. Gage is associate professor of art history at SUNY Buffalo State University. She is the author of Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome: Giulio Mancini and the Efficacy of Art.
Review Quotes:
"This lively account retrieves the life and career of Annibale Carracci, an innovative but elusive painter who shared baroque Rome with Caravaggio. Alongside reconstruction of the artist's varied oeuvre, a rich reading of verbal texts builds a portrait of a distinctive man whose work featured invention, naturalism, family collaboration, and succinct moral authority."
--Elizabeth S. Cohen, professor emerita of history, York University, Toronto