Agostino Carracci
Italian, 1557 - 1602
Painter, engraver and draughtsman, cousin of (1) Ludovico Carracci. He abandoned his profession as a tailor, which was also that of his father, Antonio, and began training as a painter. According to Faberi, he studied first in the workshop of the painter Prospero Fontana (like Ludovico), then trained under the engraver and architect Domenico Tibaldi and under the sculptor Alessandro Menganti (1531–c. 1594). However, it is likely that Faberi’s account was influenced by his desire to present Agostino’s career as an example of the versatile ‘cursus studiorum’ advocated by the Accademia degli Incamminati. Other sources (Mancini, Malvasia, Bellori) agree that it was his cousin Ludovico who was responsible for directing him towards painting. Only recently has it been assumed that he was a pupil of Bartolomeo Passarotti.
The earliest surviving works by Agostino are engravings. Engraving was an extremely profitable practice, to which he dedicated himself wholeheartedly in the first part of his career and in which he attained new heights of perfection. Although the attribution to him (Malvasia) of the frontispiece (b. 257) for the new edition of the Symbolicae quaestiones by A. Bocchi is uncertain, his first dated engravings go back to 1576 (Holy Family, from a prototype by Marcantonio Raimondi; Holy Family with SS Catherine and John the Baptist, b. 94). Between the end of the 1570s and the beginning of the 1580s Agostino made engravings after original works by Girolamo da Treviso, Orazio Samacchini, Lorenzo Sabatini, Raffaellino da Reggio and Denys Calvaert; engravings after prints by Cornelis Cort and Federico Barocci; and, finally, prints of his own composition, among them a Frieze above the Map of Bologna (1581; b. 263) and the so-called Santini (‘Little saints’), some of which are dated Rome 1581. In 1582 he was in Cremona, where he executed the illustrations for Cremona fedelissima, published by Antonio Campi in 1585 (b. 192–230). Some engravings after Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese also date to 1582.
It is difficult, on the basis of his engraved work alone, to put forward a convincing reconstruction of Agostino’s early activity as a painter. However, by the end of the 1570s he was beginning to work within the local tradition. Faberi’s mention of his work on a fresco in the locality of ‘I Ronchi’ (Bologna, Ronchi di Crevalcore) allows parts of the surviving decoration in the Palazzo Caprara to be attributed to him (Benati and Peruzzi). It is likely that Agostino not only engraved the works of the Bolognese masters of the previous generation but also improved his painting technique by copying their works. An example of this is the Judith (Bologna, Banca Carimonte), a copy of a painting by Sabatini (fragment, Berea Coll., KY; attributed to Parmigianino). He also made an engraving after this painting (b. 4).
Agostino’s engravings indicate that he made trips to Rome (1581: though not absolutely certain), Cremona (1582) and Venice (1582) and make clear that these were opportunities to free himself from the local late Mannerist tradition. In this period he studied, among others, the great Venetian painters, which enabled him to establish the basis of his expressive style. Like Ludovico and Annibale, he became convinced of the need for an intense study of nature, which is evident in a series of rapidly executed portrait drawings and oil sketches on paper (e.g. Portrait of a Boy; Parma, G.N.). He began to produce caricatures, perhaps a little ahead of his brother and cousin, a genre already practised by the Mannerists, such as Passarotti, who had developed its literary implications.
Between 1583 and 1584 Agostino worked with Ludovico and Annibale on the frieze decorations of the Stories of Europa and the Stories of Jason in the Palazzo Fava, Bologna. Here the critics agree that Agostino should be credited with the scenes in which the Venetian influence is strongest: the Meeting of Jason and Pelias, Jason Stealing the Golden Fleece and Jason Giving the Golden Fleece to Pelias. The Fête champêtre (Marseille, Mus. B.-A.) can be dated to the same period (Malvasia). The Death of Adonis (Raleigh, NC Mus. A.) may have been painted a little before the Fava frescoes and can perhaps be identified with a painting that Malvasia saw in the Donnoli house.
In 1586 Agostino was in Parma with Annibale, where he made engravings after works by Correggio, painted a Holy Family in fresco in the Capuchin church and a Virgin and Child with SS Nicholas, Cecilia, Margaret and the Infant St John (dated 1586; both Parma, G.N.) for the monastery of S Paolo. In comparison to the assured style of his earlier works, here he seems to have been intimidated by the proximity of his brother, even though the turgid forms and their Correggesque softness are highly personal. Between 1587 and 1589 Agostino was again in Venice, where he worked on more engravings after Veronese and Tintoretto. He returned to Bologna and executed a Communion of St Jerome (Bologna, Pin. N.) for the Carthusian monastery in Bologna, having elaborated the composition in a series of detailed preparatory drawings, some of which have survived (Bologna, Pin. N.; Florence, Uffizi; Vienna, Albertina). In 1590 an edition of Gerusalemme liberata by Torquato Tasso was published in Genoa, containing ten engravings (b. 182–91) by Agostino, copied from drawings by Bernardo Castello. About the same time he worked with Annibale and Ludovico on the frescoed frieze depicting the Stories of the Founding of Rome in the Palazzo Magnani–Salem, Bologna. He was responsible for the scenes of the Refugees Seeking Shelter on the Campidoglio, Romulus with the Spoils of Acronus, the Battle between the Romans and the Sabines, the Captain of the Veienti Derided and Romulus Appearing at Proclo. From the same period are the Ecce homo (Genoa, Pal. Durazzo Pallavicini), noted by Malvasia in 1678 in the Melari house in Bologna, the Portrait of a Woman Dressed as Judith (ex-Matthiesen F.A., London), the Virgin and Child with the Infant St John (Louisville, KY, Speed A. Mus.) and St Jerome in Meditation (Rome, Gal. Doria-Pamphili; attributed to Annibale).
Agostino collaborated with his relations for a few more years. Of the ovals (1592) commissioned by Cesare d’Este for a ceiling of the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, surviving letters state that, in addition to a Pluto (Modena, Gal. & Mus. Estense), Agostino also executed an Aeolus (untraced), which is recorded in a preparatory drawing (Modena, Gal. & Mus. Estense). In the Palazzo Sampieri–Talon, Bologna, where the three Carracci frescoed three rooms of the ground floor (1593–4), Agostino was responsible for the two chimney-pieces depicting Hercules and Cacus and Enceladus Struck by Lightning. The canvas of Christ and the Woman of Samaria (Milan, Brera) comes from the same palazzo and belongs to a series of overdoors (1593–4) by the three Carracci, depicting the three female sinners of the Gospels.
After his second trip to Venice, Agostino also worked on the series known as Le lascivie (‘The lusts’), which are his most famous engravings (b. 114 and 123–36). The Nativity in S Maria della Pioggia, Bologna, and the great Last Supper (Madrid, Prado) date to the same period. According to a letter of 8 July 1595 from Annibale to Giulio Fossi, in 1594 the two brothers went to Rome in order to negotiate with Cardinal Odoardo Farnese the contract for the decoration of the Palazzo Farnese, Rome (see (3), §I, 1(ii) below). While he was in Rome, Agostino made a renewed study of the work of Michelangelo, which inspired the large Assumption (Bologna, Pin. N.), a painting he left unfinished. In Bologna he painted the dated portrait of Anna Parolini Guicciardini (1598; Berlin, Gemäldegal.). At the end of the same year he moved to Rome, where he worked with his brother on the vault of the Galleria Farnese. Agostino worked on the two scenes facing each other on the long walls: the subjects, which are difficult to identify, are Glaucus and Scylla, beneath which the date 1598 is inscribed, and Aurora and Cephalus. He also painted the flanking imitation bronze medallions and ignudi. In the vault of the gallery his hand can be distinguished from that of Annibale because of its Raphaelesque sentiment and the less illusionistic rendering of form. Agostino also painted some individual canvases for the Farnese, such as the triple portrait of the Dwarf Amon, Mad Peter and Hairy Arrigo (three clowns belonging to the court of Odoardo), Democritus Laughing, the Holy Family with St Margaret and the Infant St John and St Jerome Praying (all Naples, Capodimonte).
Disagreements with his brother and an invitation to Parma by Ranuccio II persuaded Agostino to leave Rome in autumn 1599, at which time he may already have been suffering from poor health (Mancini). In Parma he began to decorate the vault of a room of the Palazzo del Giardino, but it remained unfinished at his death. At the centre are Three Cupids; on the three sides, separated by stucco decorations, are scenes depicting Galatea and the Argonauts, Venus and Mars and a Warrior Resisting the Enchantment of a Siren, which Bellori interpreted as being allegories of venal love, lascivious love and virtuous love. Agostino achieved an almost ‘purist’ elegance in this work. A few small-scale paintings such as the Holy Family and Mary Magdalene Meditating (both Genoa, Pal. Durazzo Pallavicini) can be dated to the same period. Other works executed for the Farnese and recorded in the inventories, such as the Galatea, known through preparatory drawings (Vienna, Albertina) and a number of copies (Parma, Pal. Giardino) or else mentioned by Faberi (two portraits of Ranuccio Farnese, one depicting him dressed in armour and the other in adoration before the Virgin), have not been traced.
Agostino was buried in Parma Cathedral. On 18 January 1603 the Accademia degli Incamminati held a solemn funeral service for him in the church of the Ospedale della Morte in Bologna, in which his commemoration became the pretext for a celebration of the academy itself, as had been the case at Michelangelo’s funeral celebrated in Florence by the Accademia del Disegno.
C. van Tuyll van Serooskerken, et al. "Carracci." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T014340pg2 (accessed March 22, 2012).
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