Fig. 317. Annibale Carracci. The Bean Eater.—Prince Colonna, Rome.
Fig. 318. Annibale Carracci. Flight to Egypt.—Doria, Rome.
Fig. 319. Annibale Carracci. Ceiling Detail.—Farnese Palace, Rome.
Annibale and Agostino were called to Rome in 1595 to fresco Cardinal Odoardo Farnese’s palace. Annibale was thirty-five years old, Agostino a few years younger. Both had reaped all honors possible at Bologna, and they came to the Eternal City at a fortunate moment. The favorite decorators were men of routine talent, Taddeo Zuccaro and the Cavaliere d’Arpino. Caravaggio’s amazing and perturbing genius had already asserted itself, but he was not a mural painter. After a preliminary series of mythologies in the riverside casino of the Palazzo Farnese, Annibale turned, in 1597, to the decoration of the great hall. It was a lofty tunnel-like room of refractory proportions. The theme was to be the loves of the gods. But the great spaces in which are represented Bacchus and Ariadne, the Judgment of Paris, Polyphemus and Galatea, Cephalus and Aurora, Hero and Leander, amongst other subjects, yield in effect to the general plan and the incidental decoration. Annibale, who despite contemporary accounts to the contrary, controlled everything, has taken as his motive the architectural framework which Michelangelo designed for the Sistine, with its burden of decorative nudes. One looks past heavy painted cornices, Figure [319], to painted statuary in profusion, thickly set, and, behind, more nudes in natural hues, the whole echoed by nudes in stucco relief on the walls. We have instead of the relative flatness of Michelangelo and his predecessors a consistent lumpiness, which, while theoretically tasteless, is actually rich, satisfying, and even light. Only an extraordinary ability could have kept any kind of unity in this wilful and extravagant complexity, Figure [320]. But unity there is and coherent expression of a mood at once pompous and festal.
Fig. 320. Annibale Carracci and Helpers. Grand Hall, Farnese Palace.—Rome.
The pictures, as we have noted, seem to count for less than their borders. When we examine the love scenes, we find them at once coarse and mannered. They are superficially like Giulio Romano at Mantua but without his self-satisfied brutality. To this extent they are inferior, and indeed the strain to be at once grand, graceful, and passionate is only too apparent throughout the pictorial part. Yet as a whole the decoration seems hardly inferior in power, ingenuity, and rhythmical fulness to such ancient masterpieces of kindred inspiration as the Pergamon frieze. For the moment the decoration was enthusiastically acclaimed, after three-quarters of a century it taught Charles Le Brun the way to decorate the Louvre and the Palace at Versailles, and even today the admirer of the fountains of Rome and of her Baroque churches must admit that Annibale caught the very spirit of his day, in its superfluity of learned vaingloriousness and shortage of the simpler and more noble passions.