The Carracci

The Carracci (Italian: [karˈrattʃi]) were a Bolognese family of artists that played an instrumental role in bringing forth the art movement known as the Baroque. Brothers Annibale (1560–1609) and Agostino (1557–1602) along with their cousin Ludovico (1555–1619) worked collaboratively on art works and art theories pertaining to the Baroque style. The Carracci family left their legacy in art theory by starting a school for artists in 1582. The school was called the Accademia degli Incamminati, and its main focus was to oppose and challenge Mannerist artistic practices and principles in order to create art that was avant-garde with a new modernist edge. “Jointly they effected an artistic reform that overthrew Mannerist aesthetics and initiated the Baroque.”

The importance of their artistic and theoretical activity, recognized in all three painters, underlined by the studies of critics and historians of the arts such as André Chastel, Giulio Carlo Argan, and many others, has decisively contributed to the exit of the crisis of Mannerism, to the formation of the figurative Baroque, and to new pictorial solutions based on the recuperation of the classical and Renaissance tradition but renewed following the practice and the precepts of the study of the true and of the design.

The crisis of the culture of Catholicism was highlighted after the Protestant Reform (in 1517 Martin Luther expounded his 95 theses in Wittenberg), and the successive “sack of Rome” by the troops of Charles V in 1527, facts that rendered the papal capital more insecure and unstable, and less attractive to the artists of the Roman epoch who at the end of the 16th century were less inclined to produce a new artistic movement.

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