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Farnese Palace
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The Carracci family had worked for years in Bologna before Annibale, who was by far the greatest artist of the family, was called to Rome by Cardinal Odoardo Farnese in 1595. There he was commissioned to carry out his masterpiece, the decoration of the Farnese Gallery in the cardinal's family palace. He first decorated a small room with stories of Hercules, and then in 1597 undertook the ceiling of the larger gallery, where the theme was The Loves of the Gods, or, as a contemporary described it, `human love governed by Celestial love'.The illustration here gives some idea of the rich decorations which Carricci produced. Although the ceiling introduces an interesting interplay of various illusionistic elements, it retains fundamentally the self-contained and unambiguous character of High Renaissance decoration,. In this sense, it is directly derived from Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and Raphael's frescos in the Vatican Loggie and the Farnesina. But Carracci's work can be seen as one of the foundations of the untrammelled stream of Baroque illusionism still to come. Immediately identified as one of the supreme masterpieces of painting, this room was enormously influential, not only as a pattern book of heroic figure design, but also as a model of ambitious history painting, which was to dominate the Baroque period. |
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