Works by Agostino Carracci
91 works · 304 ms
Agostino Carracci spent years engraving other painters' pictures, by Barocci, Tintoretto, Veronese and Correggio among others, and with his brother Annibale and cousin Ludovico he founded a teaching academy in Bologna.
A Bologna tailor's son, he trained as a goldsmith, studied painting under Prospero Fontana and Bartolomeo Passarotti, and learned engraving from Cornelis Cort in Venice, where he stayed a long time with Annibale. The Accademia degli Incamminati, which the brothers set up with Ludovico, was meant to find alternatives to the Mannerism before it.
Most of the works that follow are prints, largely religious or mythological and many from the 1580s. The lettering on a plate often names the painter: Mercury and the Three Graces, of 1589, is marked as Tintoretto's picture. Aeneas and His Family Fleeing Troy, of 1595, follows a composition by Federico Barocci; Aeneas carries his father out of burning Troy as his wife Creusa falls behind. Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, of 1586, is more his own, though part of the landscape comes from a painting by Ludovico: the saint throws both arms up as the rays reach him.
As a painter he was admired in his day but came to be overshadowed by Annibale. In The Last Supper, of 1593–1594, a dog and a cat tussle while a man stoops to a basket of bread. His pen study of shepherds bringing gifts, from about 1598–1600, was the design for an Adoration of the Shepherds that Annibale painted, now lost. Called to Parma in 1600 by Duke Ranuccio I Farnese to decorate the Palazzo del Giardino, he died there in 1602 before finishing it.
Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Cleveland Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Museo del Prado, Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Portrait: Agostino Carracci.
