Art: Triumphant Comeback

The most versatile painting family in Italian history was the Carracci of 16th century Bologna, two brothers and a cousin who burst on the post-Renaissance scene as tireless and talented jacks-of-all-styles. Singly or together, they could turn out madonnas with Raphael’s angelic sweetness, turbulent figures that writhed in Michelangelesque contortions, landscapes as peaceful as Giorgione’s, plus a wealth of portraits, murals, ceiling decorations, caricatures. Their proud boast was that by borrowing from the best of the Renaissance masters they avoided becoming the followers of any one, instead were the equals of all.

So dazzling were the results that generations of critics confidently put the Carracci in a class with the greats: Michelangelo, Giorgione, Titian, Correggio, Raphael. But by the 19th century their repute had fallen so far that John Ruskin could dismiss their work contemptuously as “the scum of Titian.” Bologna, proud of its own, decided this year once again to pit the Carracci against the critics, for the past two months has been staging the biggest Carracci show ever: 115 canvases and 250 sketches chosen from museums the world over. To the surprise of the sponsors, the Carracci have turned out to be the biggest drawing card in Bolognese history; attendance figures have gone as high as 8,000 in a single day, rolled up a total of 200,000.

Paths of the Future. The exhibit proves the magnitude of the Carracci’s achievement in cleaning up in the wake of the Renaissance masters, codifying their discoveries into the greatest surviving art tradition of Western Europe. At one level their conversion of Renaissance ideals into an academic package of rules and theories merely opened the door wide to the host of imitators that to this day grinds out tearful madonnas or resurrected Christs borne heavenward by muscular angels and simpering cherubim. But their virtuoso talents, turning back from the feverish mental imagery of the mannerists, also served as a transmission belt between the Renaissance and the three new paths Western art was to follow in the next two centuries. The ennobling gestures and grand manner were picked up by Rubens when he visited Rome, became a feeder line for the rhetoric and exuberance of the baroque artists. The Carracci’s love of the local color of Bologna’s narrow streets set the tone for realism; their caricatures created a style that Hogarth later cashed in on. Their reordering of the classical tradition was carried on by Poussin and the neoclassicism of Ingres; their concern for formal harmonies is still alive in cubism and 20th century modern architecture.

Slice of Bologna. A favorite anecdote of art historians has long been the answer the Carracci gave when asked which one had painted a picture. “I Carracci; we all had a hand in it.” But though in their early days all three combined forces to create frescoes for the wealthy Bologna merchants, the present exhibition clearly shows that far from being a painting factory, the Carracci were men of marked and individual bent.

Ludovico Carracci (1555-1619), a butcher’s son, was the eldest and founder of the Carracci’s Academy, by preference specialized in religious subjects. Agostino (1557-1602), trained first as a goldsmith, was witty, handsome and erudite. A superb draftsman, he excelled in etching, and his paintings of broad-bottomed nudes are among the Carracci’s best.

But of all the family, it was Annibale (1560-1609), youngest of the three, who was easily the most talented. Silent, melancholy and absorbed in his work in later years, in his youth he loved to caricature his drinking companions, and in The Butcher Shop (see cut) painted a slice of Bologna life that is the hit of the current show. His crowded, Michelangelesque murals for the Palazzo Farnese in Rome set the style for baroque ceilings for the rest of the 17th century, are today ranked by such art historians as New York University’s Walter Friedlaender as “second only to Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling.”

Last week the Carracci received a tribute from the greatest holdout of them all, Critic Bernard Berenson,,’ who once dismissed their whole school as “worthless.” Wrote Berenson in Milan’s Corriere della Sera: “After a century of obscurity and almost oblivion the Carracci, with a roll of drums and the sound of trumpets, have made their great comeback in Bologna.” Berenson still refused to place the Carracci “among the greatest painters,” but he gave a cheer for Annibale’s Butcher Shop. Said he: “My attention is attracted by the realism that pervades this painting. I do not recall elsewhere movement, gestures or expressions so real or so lifelike.”