The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (91 page)

 
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(1827–75).
French sculptor and painter. The son of a mason, he worked for some months in the studio of
Rude
and also studied at the École des
Beaux-Arts
, where he won the
Prix de Rome
in 1854. His
Ugolino
(Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 1860–2) earned him the acclaim of the French colony in Rome, and upon his return to Paris in 1862 he won favour with the court, receiving many commissions for portrait busts. He also made several large sculpture groups, of which the most famous is
La Danse
(1869) for the façade of the Paris Opéra (the original is now in the Musée d'Orsay). This uninhibitedly dynamic work caused a sensation, was denounced as immoral, and had ink thrown over it. Partially because of such attacks on his work, he suffered from a persecution complex in his final years before his early death from cancer. Carpeaux was the outstanding French sculptor of his period and an influential figure. His exuberance of feeling and vivacious modelling made a decisive break with the
Neoclassical
tradition and presaged the work of
Rodin
. His paintings are well represented in the Petit Palais in Paris, and there are also good examples of his work in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Valenciennes, his home town.

 
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(1871–1945).
Canadian painter of
Expressionist
landscapes. Her artistic development was slow and halting, interrupted by ill health and the need to undertake other work to earn a living. Her training was mainly in San Francisco, 1889–95, England, 1899–1904, and Paris, 1910–11. In France she was impressed by the work of the
Fauves
and was probably also influenced by Frances
Hodgkins
. After her return to Carnada she painted the landscape of her native British Columbia with passionate feeling for the power of nature, executing much of her work out of doors. Discouraged by years of neglect, she had almost ceased to paint when in 1927 she was overwhelmed when she first saw the work of the
Group of Seven
in Toronto. Thereafter she worked with renewed energy and deepened spirituality, her ardent spirit given free rein. She was the author of several autobiographical works and overcame her earlier neglect to attain the status of a national heroine.

 
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(1881–1966).
Italian painter and writer on art, a prominent figure in both
Futurism
and
Metaphysical painting
. He joined the Futurists in 1909, and visits to Paris in 1911 and 1912 introduced a
Cubist
influence into his work. In his best-known painting
The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli
(MOMA, New York, 1911), for example, he combined the dynamism typical of Futurism with a sense of Cubist structural severity. In 1915 he met Giorgio de
Chirico
and turned to Metaphysical painting, producing about twenty works with de Chirico's paraphernalia of posturing mannequins, half-open doors, mysteriously significant interiors, etc., though generally without his typically sinister feeling. Carrà broke with de Chirico in 1918 and abandoned Metaphysical painting, adhering in the 1920s and 1930s to the principles of the
Novecento Italiano
. He championed a return to traditional values in the journal
Valori Plastici
and also in the Milan newspaper
L'Ambrosiano
, of which he was art critic from 1921 to 1938. From 1941 to 1952 he was professor of painting at the Brera Academy in Milan.

 
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Carracci
.

Family of Bolognese painters, the brothers
Agostino
(1557–1602) and
Annibale
(1560–1609) and their cousin
Ludovico
(1555–1619), who were prominent figures at the end of the 16th cent. in the movement against the prevailing
Mannerist
artificiality of Italian painting. They worked together early in their careers, and it is not easy to distinguish their shares in, for example, the cycle of frescos in the Palazzo Fava in Bologna (
c.
1583–4). In the early 1580s they opened a private teaching
academy
, which soon became a centre for progressive art. It was originally called the Accademia dei Desiderosi (‘Desiderosi’ meaning ‘desirous of fame and learning’), but later changed its name to Accademia degli Incamminati (Academy of the Progressives). In their teaching they laid special emphasis on drawing from the life (all three were outstanding graphic artists) and clear draughtsmanship became a quality particularly associated with artists of the Bolognese School, notably
Domenichino
and
Reni
, two of the leading members of the following generation who trained with the Carracci.
They continued working in close relationship until 1595, when Annibale, who was by far the greatest artist of the family, was called to Rome by Cardinal Odoardo
Farnese
to carry out his masterpiece, the decoration of the Farnese Gallery in the cardinal's family palace. He first decorated a small room called the Camerino with stories of Hercules, and in 1597 undertook the ceiling of the larger gallery, where the theme was
The Loves of the Gods
, or, as
Bellori
described it, ‘human love governed by celestial love’. Although the ceiling is rich in the interplay of various illusionistic elements, it retains fundamentally the self-contained and unambiguous character of High
Renaissance
decoration, drawing inspiration from
Michelangelo's
Sistine Ceiling and
Raphael's
frescos in the Vatican Loggie and the Farnesina. The full untrammelled stream of
Baroque
illusionism was still to come in the work of
Cortona
and
Lanfranco
, but Annibale's decoration was one of the foundations of their style. Throughout the 17th and 18th cents. the Farnese Ceiling was ranked alongside the Sistine Ceiling and Raphael's frescos in the Vatican Stanze as one of the supreme masterpieces of painting. It was enormously influential not only as a pattern book of heroic figure design, but also as a model of technical procedure; Annibale made hundreds of drawings for the ceiling, and until the age of
Romanticism
such elaborate preparatory work became accepted as a fundamental part of composing any ambitious history painting. In this sense, Annibale exercised a more profound influence than his great contemporary
Caravaggio
, for the latter never worked in fresco, which was still regarded as the greatest test of a painter's ability and the most suitable vehicle for painting in the
Grand Manner
.
Annibale's other works in Rome also had great significance in the history of painting. Pictures such as
Domine, Quo Vadis
? (NG, London,
c.
1602) reveal a striking economy in figure composition and a force and precision of gesture that had a profound influence on
Poussin
and through him on the whole language of gesture in painting. He developed landscape painting along similar lines, and is regarded as the father of
ideal
landscape, in which he was followed by Domenichino (his favourite pupil),
Claude
, and Poussin.
The Flight into Egypt
(Doria Gal., Rome,
c.
1604) is Annibale's masterpiece in this genre. In his last years Annibale was overcome by melancholia and gave up painting almost entirely after 1606. When he died he was buried according to his wishes near Raphael in the Pantheon. It is a measure of his achievement that artists as great and diverse as
Bernini
, Poussin, and
Rubens
found so much to admire and praise in his work. Annibale's art also had a less formal side that comes out in his
caricatures
(he is generally credited with inventing the form) and in his early
genre
paintings, which are remarkable for their lively observation and free handling (
The Butcher's Shop
, Christ Church, Oxford).
Agostino assisted Annibale in the Farnese Gallery from 1597 to 1600, but he was important mainly as a teacher and engraver. His systematic anatomical studies were engraved after his death and were used for nearly two centuries as teaching aids. He spent the last two years in Parma, where he did his own ‘Farnese Ceiling’, decorating a ceiling in the Palazzo del Giardino with mythological scenes for Duke Ranuccio Farnese. It shows a meticulous but somewhat spiritless version of his brother's lively
classicism
.
Ludovico left Bologna only for brief periods and directed the Carracci academy by himself after his cousins had gone to Rome. His work is uneven and highly personal. Painterly and expressive considerations always outweigh those of stability and calm classicism in his work, and at its best there is a passionate and poetic quality indicative of his preference for
Tintoretto
and Jacopo
Bassano
. His most fruitful period was 1585–95, but near the end of his career he still produced remarkable paintings of an almost
Expressionist
force, such as the
Christ Crucified above Figures in Limbo
(Sta Francesca Romana, Ferrara, 1614).
The Carracci fell from grace in the 19th cent. along with all the other Bolognese painters, who were one of
Ruskin's
pet hates and whom he considered (1847) had ‘no single virtue, no colour, no drawing, no character, no history, no thought’. They were saddled with the label
‘eclectic’
and thought to be ponderous and lacking in originality. Their full rehabilitation had to wait until the second half of the 20th cent. (the great Carracci exhibition held in Bologna in 1956 was a notable event), but Annibale has now regained his place as one of the giants of Italian painting.
Agostino's illegitimate son
Antonio
(1589?–1618) was the only offspring of the three Carracci. He had a considerable reputation as an artist in his day, but after his early death was virtually forgotten, and it is only recently that his work has been reconsidered.