The Working method of Caravaggio and Annibale


The two 17th century masters, Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci had different approaches for executing a painting. Without further study Caravaggio could easily copy nature, imitating common forms without beauty, he was known as the painter of common people with dirty-feet and ragged sleeves. Annibale studied and planned his paintings thoroughly with his drawings before any attempt to start executing a painting. He was praised to have returned Italian art to the glory of the High Renaissance by his combination of ideal beauty and naturalism.

The Baroque reaction against the anti-naturalistic and abstract tendencies of international Mannerism began in different centers of Italy from about 1580 onwards. Under the influence of Correggio and the Venetians the world of mystery and revelation became palpable, majestic, of flesh and blood, replacing the complexity, sophistication and artificiality of Late Mannerism. Paintings that have come to be viewed as conventional to us now were truly new and experimental in their time.

To his contemporaries, his horrifying religious dramas - cinematic staging of crucial instants in the lives of saints and martyrs, briefly illuminated for a rapt audience by shafts of dazzling light - seemed the most exciting work of the time. Caravaggio insisted on specifics, he was able to translate subtle optical and tactile distinctions into painterly effects - a sharp eyes realism that he described in what amounts to his only documented statement about art as knowing "How to paint well and to imitate natural things well" .

Caravaggio scorned the traditional idealized interpretation of religious subjects; he took his models from the streets and painted them realistically. Caravaggio devoted himself to imitating a head from life, without studying the fundamentals of artistic design and of spatial depth. He had taken up a good style of painting from nature, even though he did not have much judgment, in selecting the good and avoiding the bad in the things he represented.

Caravaggio's still life painting of flowers and fruits for Cavalier Giuseppe d'Arpino, were excellent picture of reality. He painted a vase of flowers that captured the transparencies of the water and the glass and the reflections of the window of a room, while the flowers were sprinkled with the freshest dew.

By sometime between 1588 and 1592, Caravaggio went to Rome. He was already in possession of the fundamental technical skills of painting and had acquired, with characteristic eagerness, a thorough understanding of the approach of the Lombard and Venetian painters, who had developed a style that was nearer to representing nature and events.

The execution of the three large paintings of scenes from that saint's life: St. Matthew and the Angel, The Calling of St. Matthew, and The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, in which Caravaggio substituted a dramatic contemporary realism for the traditional pictorial formulas used in depicting saints, provoked public astonishment. In the first version of St. Matthew and the Angel, the evangelist has the physical features of a plowman or a common labourer. His big feet seem to stick out of the picture, and his posture, legs crossed, is awkward almost to the point of vulgarity. Caravaggio suffered disappointment from his pictures when they were taken down from their altars, also for his Death of the Virgin in the Chiesa della Scala, removed because he had imitated the swollen body of a dead woman too closely.

Caravaggio was making himself more renowned for the colouring he was introducing, reinforced throughout with bold shadows, suing a great deal of black to give relief to the forms. He went so far in this manner of working that he never brought any of his figures out into the daylight, but found a way to paint them against the darkness of a closed room, taking a high lamp that hung vertically over the principal part of the body, and leaving the rest in shadow, so as to give force through the power of light and dark . The resulting his paintings is a harsh, raking light that strikes across the composition, illuminating parts of it while plunging the rest into deep shadow. The dramatic illumination heightens the emotional tension, focuses the details, and isolates the figures, which are usually placed in the foreground of the picture in a deliberately casual grouping. Supper at Emmaus is an example of Caravaggio's virtuoso talent. Not only are the protagonists and the still life rendered equally with impeccable technique but the attitude of the apostles as they react to Christ is a remarkable interpretation. The circumstances and heightened emotion of the narrative are given further expression with dramatic chiaroscuro and powerful foreshortening. By 1592, his controversial painting methods were causing scandal. He rejected the lengthy preparations traditional in central Italy, preferring instead to work in oils directly from the subject - half length and still life - as practiced by the Venetians. He aimed to make paintings that depicted the truth and he was critically condemned for being a naturalist.

Instead of idealizing his subjects as academic practice required, Caravaggio presented them with apparently uncritical directness, as seemingly unedited natural things. But significant, important art demanded not an appreciation of the unpredictable irregularities of reality, but an understanding of ideal beauty as defined by the Greeks and Romans, Raphael and Michelangelo, along with a command of geometrically ordered composition and perspective space, and above all, with a mastery of drawing, through which the painter exhibited his grasp of ideal beauty and geometric order. Caravaggio's pictures, rooted as they were in the observable world, painted directly from life without carefully plotted preparatory drawings, the images thrust forward almost into the viewer's own space, failed to meet these criteria. The impassioned rebel who broke with academic conventions by substituting direct observation of the world around him for generalized concepts of ideal beauty, and the brilliant synthesizer of the traditions of Lombard realism and Venetian classicism.

His method of working omitted the routine of setting out to learn from study and instruction, he readily found in the streets or squares of Rome both master and models for copying nature. His easy style attracted many younger artists, but dismayed by older painters that he painted all his figures in one light and on one plane without any gradation.

? . Without further study he could easily copy nature, imitating common forms and without beauty. Caravaggio ignored and despised the most excellent marbles of the ancients and the famous paintings of Raphael, he resolved that nature would be the only subject of his brush. "When the most famous statues of Phidias and Glykon were pointed out to him so that he could use them as models, he made no reply other than extending his hand towards a crowed of people, saying that nature had provided him with enough masters" . Capture reality so purely. A further point worth stressing is that the Boy Bitten by a Lizard has been universally perceived, as depicting a momentary or instantaneous sate of affairs. It demonstrated the artist's skill in rendering the fleeting moment in which sharp pain is reflected in the boy's expression, as in a snapshot.

Annibale's ideal of classical solidity and perfection were achieved through a series of preparatory drawings; this is a direct opposite preparatory approach to Caravaggio's method. From about 1585 onwards we can follow step by step Annibale's development towards a great monumental style. It was he who became the creator of a grand manner, a dramatic style, buttressed by close study of antiquity and nature - a style in which he struck a balance between the Roman tradition of compact form on the one hand, and Venetian colour and Correggiesque sfumato on the other; between the scientific study of expression and movement, and subjective emotionalism. This style contained the seeds of both the Baroque and the classical currents of the seventeenth century. Annibale prepared his paintings and frescos in large, carefully executed chalk drawings. Many such drawings for the Camerino Farnese and the Farnese Gallery have survived, and the collection at Windsor contains brilliant examples of this kind .

Most of the preparatory figure studies were made from life models, but among the new Roman impressions they often take on something of the quality of ancient statuary , for example, Hercules Resting was modeled on Greco-Roman's River God Tiber and the Head of a Woman (black chalk, 1597-00) was modeled on Hellenistic's Niobe with Her younger daughter.

Annibale credited the success of his frescoes in the Camerino and Galleria of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome with the long and assiduous preparations he made in drawings and in modeling figures in relief . He also continually copied ancient sculpture to perfect his forms. He constantly reworked his concepts in drawings and in the final cartoons, as well as in oil studies . Annibale's extant drawings for the Farnese gallery showed the care that went into the preparation of his paintings. The numerous studies for the layout of the ceiling indicated that Annibale looked to various sources, including Pellegrino Tibaldi's frescoes in the Palazzo Poggi, Bologna; Cavaliere d'Arpino's ceiling in the Cappella Olgiati in Santa Prassede, Rome; and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel in the Vatican .

Annibale's preparatory methods depended on working out the compositions of paintings based on the knowledge he had of previous artists' contributions, making further studies to work out the arrangement of light on the forms, doing additional drawings to study the positions of individual figures, even working these forms out by means of papier-mache models and copies of sculpture and paintings. He then made detailed studies of individual figures and parts of figures to adjust the light and position of the forms, and finally, he put this all together by means of elaborate cartoons to be transferred to the fresco or canvas. Sometimes oil sketches were made for the purpose of correcting colour.

After the careful preparation in the workshop the artist was at the final step in the execution of his painting. The result never betrays the work that went into it. Many of these early preparatory studies were a means to a higher end.

The complicated integration of all parts of the Farnese Gallery's frescoes could only be achieved by an almost scientific clarification in preparatory drawings. The drawings, in a complex medium of pen work, red chalk, white gouache, and brown wash, is preparation at an advanced stage for the composition of the painting . The group of drawings involved both masculine and feminine models, copies of relief sculptures as well as antique heads; also studies of anatomy through dissection of corpses in order to understand the nerves, muscles, and bones of the human body. The group included six hundred drawings devoted to the inventions of the Farnese Gallery alone

It was in the Farnese Gallery that Annibale, authoritatively re-established, after the Mannerist interlude, the working method of Raphael and Michelangelo. His ideas took shape step by step in a number of stages: the elaboration of the general scheme in rapid sketches, studies in chalk or pen of individual scenes, clarifying sketches of single figures, detailed studies from the nude, in the poses established in the preliminary drawings, the final design, and the cartoon on which the execution was based. His powers of observation did not diminish in his drawings for the Farnese Gallery, which have been described as hyper idealized, classicizing works . Hercules Supporting the Sphere's drawing, from the live model , concentrated on Hercules' upper body. The pose is close to the final conception, but the right arm is still unresolved; the study is an example of foreshortening. It is one of the twenty studies that were known for this figure alone . Another example is the Two Oarsmen and its rapid initial sketch showing the two figures rowing away. There is little difference between the poses of the figures on this sheet and in the final painting. Annibale's main concern here is to fix the contours of the figures and to see how the light, which adds relief quality to the muscles of the sailors, can be used to increase the sense of physicality.

The historical importance of Annibale's preparatory work for the Gallery can hardly be overestimated. He not only revived but, handed down to his school the Renaissance method of preparing monumental fresco painting.

Annibale Carracci impresses us with the expressive power of his classicism, with a canny combination of the ideal and the real, of subtle drawing and sensuous colouring - a validation of the traditional studio formula that counselled forging a style of central Italian desegno and Venetian colourito. Like a Raphael reborn, Annibale demonstrates that an art of strict formal control, an art dedicated to a measured norm, to the practice of the rules of a pictorial rhetoric, can distill the deepest passion in images of profound affect. The Dead Christ Mourned, from the National Gallery in London, succeeds in moving us precisely because its pathos is subjected to such rigorous control; and the Piet a from Naples, one of the most powerful paintings in any tradition, adds new dimensions of feeling to its inspiring model, Michelangelo's marble group in St. Peter's.

Fine observation is crucial to an art which captures spontaneous human behaviour and which is so evocative of visual sensation. Annibale's drawings provide abundant evidence of this ability. In the Beaneater the modeling of the figure's face with black chalk, sensitively recording the play of light and sensuous in its own right, reinforces the immediacy established by the boy's direct gaze at the viewer. His drawings of these years reveal also the intense study Annibale made of his fellow man at work and at play either in preparation for his paintings or simply as experimentation and practice . The drawing of the Boy Eating indicated his intense interesting experimentation of scientific principles to record nature in its true form.





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Bibliography:

Bauder and Colton, 2000: Bauer Linda and Colton, Steve, 'Tracing in some works by Caravaggio', Burlington Magazine, 142, 2000, pp. 434-6.

Bellori, 1672: Bellori, Giovanni Pietro, 'Life of Caravaggio', in Puglisi, C., Caravaggio, London, 1998, pp. 415-18.

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Benati [et al.], 1999: Benati, Daniele [et al.], Catalogue No. 27-61, The Drawings of Annibale Carracci, Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1999, pp.123-198.

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De Grazia, 1995: De Grazia, Diane, 'Drawings as Means to an End: Preparatory Methods in the Carracci School', in The Craft of Art: Originality and Industry in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque workshop, Athens and London, 1995, pp. 165-186.

De Grazia, 1999: De Grazia, Diane, 'The Inventive Genius of Annibale Carracci', in Benati, Daniele [et al.], The Drawings of Annibale Carracci, Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1999.

Friedlaender, Walter, 1955: Caravaggio Studies, Princeton University Press, 1955.

Jaffe: Jaffe, Michael, 'Annibale and Ludovico Carracci: notes on drawing', Photocopy, call number: X59-84 from Fine Arts Library, Auckland.

Palmer, 1992: Palmer, Rodney, 'Caravaggio's cutting edge', Apollo, 135, 1992, pp. 258-59.

Summerscale, 2000: Summerscale, Anne, Malvasia's Life of the Carracci, Univerisity Park, Penn., 2000.

Thomas, 1985: Thomas, Troy, 'Expressive Aspects of Caravaggio's First Inspiration of Saint Matthew', Art Bulletin, 67, 1985, pp. 636-652.

Wittkower, 1952: Wittkower, Rudolf, The drawings of The Carracci in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen of Windsor Castle, Phaidon Press, London, 1952.




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