Editing Annibale Carracci (section)

==Contrast with Caravaggio==
[[Image:Domine, quo vadis?.jpg|thumb|Carracci's ''[[Domine quo vadis?]]'' (Jesus and [[Saint Peter]])]]
[[File:Annibale Carracci - Pietà with Sts Francis and Mary Magdalen - WGA4443.jpg|thumb|''Pietà with Sts Francis and Mary Magdalen'']] 
The 17th-century critic [[Giovanni Bellori]], in his survey entitled ''Idea'', praised Carracci as the paragon of [[Italian painters]], who had fostered a "renaissance" of the great tradition of [[Raphael]] and [[Michelangelo]]. On the other hand, while admitting [[Caravaggio]]'s talents as a painter, Bellori deplored his over-naturalistic style, if not his turbulent morals and persona. He thus viewed the ''[[Caravaggisti]]'' styles with the same gloomy dismay. Painters were urged to depict the Platonic ideal of beauty, not Roman street-walkers. Yet Carracci and Caravaggio patrons and pupils did not all fall into irreconcilable camps. Contemporary patrons, such as Marquess [[Vincenzo Giustiniani]], found both applied showed excellence in ''maniera'' and ''modeling''.<ref>Wittkover, p. 57.</ref>

By the 21st century, scholarly and public interest in Caravaggio's dramatic style had grown considerably, sometimes drawing less attention to Carracci's influence on Baroque fresco traditions. Caravaggio almost never worked in fresco, regarded as the test of a great painter's mettle. On the other hand, Carracci is particularly noted for his frescoes. Thus the somber canvases of Caravaggio, with benighted backgrounds, are suited to the contemplative altars, and not to well-lit walls or ceilings such as this one in the Farnese. Wittkower was surprised that a Farnese cardinal surrounded himself with frescoes of libidinous themes, indicative of a "considerable relaxation of counter-reformatory morality". This thematic choice suggests Carracci may have been more rebellious relative to the often-solemn religious passion of Caravaggio's canvases. According to art historian Rudolf Wittkower, Carracci's frescoes express "a tremendous joie de vivre" and mark "a new blossoming of vitality."

In the 21st century, most connoisseurs making the pilgrimage to the [[Cerasi Chapel]] in [[Santa Maria del Popolo]] would ignore Carracci's ''[[Assumption of the Virgin (Cerasi Chapel)|Assumption of the Virgin]]'' altarpiece (1600–1601) and focus on the flanking Caravaggio works. It is instructive to compare Carracci's ''Assumption''<ref>See the more adept altarpiece at the Prado ([http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/c/carracci/annibale/1/index.html Paintings by Annibale Carracci]. ''[[Web Gallery of Art]]'', retrieved May 28, 2011)</ref> with Caravaggio's ''[[Death of the Virgin (Caravaggio)|Death of the Virgin]]''. Among early contemporaries, Carracci was an innovator. He re-enlivened Michelangelo's visual fresco vocabulary, and posited a muscular and vivaciously brilliant pictorial landscape, which had increasingly reflected the complexity and artificiality characteristic of the [[Mannerism|Mannerist]] style. While Michelangelo could bend and contort the body into all the possible perspectives, Carracci’s treatment of the human figure in the Farnese frescoes demonstrated a dynamic approach to form and movement. The "ceiling"-frontiers, the wide expanses of walls to be frescoed would, for the next decades, be thronged by the monumental brilliance of the Carracci followers, and not Caravaggio's followers.

[[File:Annibale Carracci Madonna con Bambino, santa Lucia, san Giovannino e angelo, Feigen collection.jpg|thumb|''Madonna and Child with Saint Lucy, the Infant Saint John the Baptist and an Angel'']]

In the century following his death, to a lesser extent than [[Bernini]] and Cortona, Carracci and baroque art in general came under criticism from neoclassic critics such as [[Johann Joachim Winckelmann|Winckelmann]] and even later from the prudish [[John Ruskin]], as well as admirers of Caravaggio. Carracci in part was spared opprobrium because he was seen as an emulator of the highly admired Raphael, and in the Farnese frescoes, attentive to the proper themes such as those of antique mythology.