Annibale Carracci

Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) was born in Bologna, trained under Prospero Fontana, and worked in Bologna, Parma and Venice before moving to Rome, where he died. With his brother and cousin he founded an academy in Bologna dedicated to reforming painting through drawing from life and close study of the Renaissance masters — a deliberate corrective to the artifice of late Mannerism. The frescoes he painted in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome were treated for the next two centuries as a standard against which history painting was measured, and his reform runs directly into Domenichino, Guido Reni and the whole Bolognese tradition. He is the other pole of Roman painting around 1600: where Caravaggio worked from the model and the shadow, Carracci worked from drawing and design. Three works here: Domine, quo vadis?, Entombment of Christ and The Temptation of St Anthony Abbot.