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The Naturalists believed that nature was the basis for everything and that it would arrange itself. The paths of both groups often crossed and the points of view occasionally melded together so that the individual actors can only be determined by the location of their activities and not according to their original schools.
The Carraccis and their Pupils
22. Annibale Carracci, Hercules at the Crossroads, 1595-1598. Oil on canvas, 167 x 237 cm. Museo di Capodimonte, Naples.
23. Annibale Carracci, Galleria di Carracci, 1597-1604. Fresco. Palazzo Farnese, Rome.
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This direction of Italian art, known as Eclecticism, originated in Bologna. The painter Ludovico Carracci, with his cousins Agostino, who became famous for his erotic etchings, and Annibale, known mostly for his frescos, had founded an influential school of painters at the end of the sixteenth century; an academy that promoted all fields of the painting and drawing trades. The pupils were taught all that was worth copying and were kept away from Mannerism. They were successful in teaching their most talented pupils, by striving for spiritual beauty, to bring extensive and deepened formal beauty into the foreground again. The greatest combined work of the Carraccis was the decoration of the Large Gallery of the Roman Palazzo Farnese (pp. 34-35), and they received help from the best pupils of the academy: Giovanni Lanfranco (p. 11), Guido Reni (p. 39) and Domenico Zampieri, named Domenichino. The intention of the fresco decoration of the ceiling was to show the power of love over the grasping strength and pride of the universe and the soul of man. The artists were ambitious enough to take as examples the arrangement of the ceiling of the Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and the depiction of Raphael’s mythological Farnesi pictures. They were not quite successful but they did create a unified decoration with a great deal of painting mastery that can be compared with the masterworks of Raphael and Michelangelo. The presentation of the volutes, medallions with small mythological pictures between the nudes, moulding supports and winged putti (cherubim) clearly show the influence of Michelangelo, and the main pictures in the mirror of the ceiling show the influence of Raphael. The most beautiful pictures are certainly Agostino’s Abduction of Galatea by Polyphemus and Annibale Carracci’s Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne. The most beautiful of his altarpieces is that of Christ who appears to Peter with the Cross on his shoulder as Peter is fleeing from Rome in fear of a martyr’s death in the Campagna. Peter asks, “Lord, whither goest thou?” and Christ answers, “To Rome to be crucified again.” To his contemporaries, it seemed absolutely justified that Annibale Carracci shoud receive the honour of being buried next to Raphael in the Pantheon.