13 Facts About Annibale Carracci

Annibale Carracci was born in Bologna, and in all likelihood was first apprenticed within his family.

In 1582, Annibale, his brother Agostino and his cousin Ludovico Carracci opened a painters' studio, initially called by some the Academy of the Desiderosi and subsequently the Incamminati.

In 1585, Annibale Carracci completed an altarpiece of the Baptism of Christ for the church of Santi Gregorio e Siro in Bologna.

From 1589 to 1592, the three Annibale Carracci brothers completed the frescoes on the Founding of Rome for Palazzo Magnani in Bologna.

Annibale Carracci meanwhile developed hundreds of preparatory sketches for the major work, wherein he led a team painting frescoes on the ceiling of the grand salon with the secular quadri riportati of The Loves of the Gods, or as the biographer Giovanni Bellori described it, Human Love governed by Celestial Love.

Wittkower states Annibale Carracci's "frescoes convey the impression of a tremendous joie de vivre, a new blossoming of vitality and of an energy long repressed".

Annibale Carracci re-enlivened Michelangelo's visual fresco vocabulary, and posited a muscular and vivaciously brilliant pictorial landscape, which had been becoming progressively crippled into a Mannerist tangle.

Annibale Carracci was remarkably eclectic in thematic, painting landscapes, genre scenes, and portraits, including a series of autoportraits across the ages.

Annibale Carracci was one of the first Italian painters to paint a canvas wherein landscape took priority over figures, such as his masterful The Flight into Egypt; this is a genre in which he was followed by Domenichino and Claude Lorrain.

Annibale Carracci's art had a less formal side that comes out in his caricatures and in his early genre paintings, which are remarkable for their lively observation and free handling and his painting of The Beaneater.

Annibale Carracci is described by biographers as inattentive to dress, obsessed with work: his self-portraits vary in his depiction.

In 1609, Annibale Carracci died and was buried, according to his wish, near Raphael in the Pantheon of Rome.

The paintings of Annibale Carracci are inspired by the Venetian pictorial taste and especially the paintings of Paolo Veronese.