River Landscape by Annibale Carracci

In today’s episode, we get to picture ourselves in a dreamy landscape on a sunny afternoon courtesy of Annibale Carracci and the National Gallery of Art in DC. Annibale was a painter in Bologna, Italy from the 1580s to early 1600s and one of his big innovations was making landscapes like this a thing in Italian art. 

We’ll also find out how Annibale is connected to celebrity artist Lavinia Fontana who we met in a previous episode and what happened to the poor guy when he took on a project with the client from hell! 

If you want to zoom in and pan around the image for a closer look, you can find it here on the Gallery’s site. Please note: the Gallery provides their own image description on that page.

SHOW NOTES (TRANSCRIPT BELOW)

“A Long Look” opening and closing themes are by Ron Gelinas:
“Ascension” https://youtu.be/jGEdNSNkZoo and “Easy” https://youtu.be/2QGe6skVzSs

Episode music:
“Classical Piano and Cello” by Danielyan Ashot Makichevich.
https://pixabay.com/music/modern-classical-classical-piano-and-cello-short-version-112721

“The Well Tempered Clavier, Book I, BWV 846-869 – Fugue No. 21 in B-flat major, BWV 866” by Johann Sebastian Bach. Performed by Kimiko Ishizaka.
https://musopen.org/music/performer/kimiko-ishizaka/composer/johann-sebastian-bach/

Artwork information
https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.41673.html

Carracci information
“The Lives of Annibale & Agostino Carracci,” by Giovanni Pietro Bellori. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968.

“Annibale Carracci Artist Overview and Analysis”. [Internet]. 2023. TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Libby Festorazzi
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Antony Todd
Available from: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/carracci-annibale/
First published on 27 Mar 2020. Updated and modified regularly
[Accessed 04 May 2023]

Comments or questions are welcome at alonglookpodcast.com

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to A Long Look! I’m your host, Karen Jackson

Did you know most people spend only a few seconds looking at works of art? But what happens if you slow down and take a long look? 

Join me at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and let’s find out!

MUSIC

Today I’m looking at River Landscape by Annibale Carracci

If you want to follow along, you can find it at alonglookpodcast.com/river. When you get there, just click on the image to zoom in and pan around! 

So what do you first notice?

The enormous leafy tree that rudely tries to block our view of a beautiful landscape. Its charcoal-grey trunk, covered in rough bark, starts just left of center near the bottom edge and angles up to the right through the middle of the scene to run off the top of this large canvas. It’s about 5 feet wide by 3 feet high. High up, two long branches covered with delicate green leaves stretch out on either side to block even more of our view. To the left of it is a knot of three slender trees growing at different angles whose leafy upper branches are also cut off by the top and left edges. 

The trees sit along a shadowy riverbank that fills the lower left half of the canvas. They’re very close to us, like we were standing right in front of them. If it weren’t for the broken trunk to the right of the center tree, we couldn’t see anything! But what we do see is gorgeous! A narrow, gleaming peacock-blue river with little ripples of white curves in from the lower right, turns left behind the trees and flows all the way to the left edge. There’s a wooden boat on it that’s partly blocked by the center tree. 

A tiny man stands in the stern propelling it from right to left with a long pole. He leans and steps forward with the effort. The sleeves of his white shirt are pushed up showing muscular arms and he wears knee-length pumpkin-orange pants. We can see a sliver of another person dressed in black sitting in front of him and all the way in the bow are a man and woman. She’s sort of reclining while he sits upright with his hand stretched out to our left. Their elegant outfits are suggested by loosely painted frilly white collars on his goldenrod-yellow tunic and her burgundy gown. 

Beyond the boating party, the water is fringed with tall, slender green reeds along a narrow strip of land that gently slopes down from the left and right sides. Tall golden grasses and dense fern-green shrubs cover the left side, while short sage-green and mustard yellow growth carpets the right. 

A small beige cottage with a thatched roof is tucked into a little clearing on the right behind three tall, slender silver-grey trees. The slope beyond it becomes a tall tree-covered hill that climbs more than halfway up the canvas. 

The scene is softly lit from the upper left, so the trees closest to us are partly in shadow with leaves in cool tones of olive and emerald green with touches of yellow. The trees near the cottage are further back and have leaves in warms tones of sage green and gold.

Just beyond the river and that narrow sloping strip of land is another pool of water at the center of the scene. It seems to spill into a distant a wide pale blue lake.

In the far distance, ghostly white buildings stretch along the far side of the lake, surrounded by craggy slate-blue mountains. An azure-blue sky rises behind the mountains and is almost filled with hazy puffy white clouds. 

What I love about this is how dreamy and serene it is. Details are soft, even a little blurry. Those people in the boat looked relaxed and the soft lighting and all the muted blues, greens and warm golds really lower my blood pressure. Although as I looked closer, one bizarre tree caught my eye. It’s standing in that pool in the middle, leaning to our left and has a short, thick, greenish-grey trunk with a big knot at the top with all these thin, spindly, bare branches sticking out in every direction. Weird! 

MUSIC

Annibale Carracci grew up in Bologna in northern Italy. He learned painting and drawing from his cousin Ludovico and printmaking from his brother Agostino. Fun fact, remember Lavinia Fontana? Well, Ludovico was also a student in her father’s studio and became her teacher.

Anyway, Annibale’s drawing skills were so good, then when he and his father were robbed traveling back to Bologna after selling some property, he was able to draw such accurate mug shots for the authorities that the perpetrators were caught and forced to return the money! 

The three Carracci spent most of their lives in Bologna from the mid-1500s to the early 1600s. They shared a studio but eventually, Annibale hit the road to study artists in Parma and Tuscany and eventually joined his brother in Venice to see what artists there were doing. He, Agostino and Ludovico were fed up with the current style of art which featured really odd, exaggerated bodies and scenes. Everybody had long, rubbery necks and fingers, for example, especially the women. So when he and Agostino returned to Bologna they had a lot of new ideas. They decided to go back to the more classic style of artists like Titian and Veronese but combine that with a close study of nature. They had learned to pay close attention to the world them and how to draw the details of trees, plants, flowers, and mountains. So, they came back to Bologna with lots of new ideas. Their new realistic, natural style of painting became a huge hit and was so popular, they opened an art academy with Cousin Ludovico.

Another thing Annibale is best known for is making landscape paintings a thing in Italian art. He painted River Landscape in 1590 and for centuries before then, landscapes took a back seat, literally, in religious paintings or portraits. You might see some trees and hills in the background of a Bible story or painting of Mary and Jesus, for example. But here, he made nature the star. 

Now, this may not be an actual view. He, Agostino and Ludovico would go out into the country to sketch, making sure to get down the details of what they were seeing. But he’d then take all his sketches back to the studio and assemble them into a kind of idealized landscape. He wasn’t necessarily recreating the actual view they’d seen, but put the pieces together to build the scene he wanted to see while still making it look as natural as possible. What made it so convincing was bringing in all those details from his sketches.

The other new thing Annibale does here is to crop off the tops of those trees in the foreground, which how they’d look if we were standing that close to them. 

Their fresh style brought them lucrative commissions from local noble families and Annibale eventually was commissioned to work for the powerful Cardinal Farnese. The Cardinal hired him paint an enormous long gallery in his new palace in Rome. This was an incredibly complex series of dozens of scenes about the gods. Annibale didn’t do it himself, he had assistants including Agostino. But the Cardinal was apparently was the client from hell. Annibale spent six years on this project, working only for him, so he couldn’t take on other work. All you freelancers out there can relate, right? And the Cardinal enjoyed bullying him and making him work on unrelated projects. 

By the end, Annibale was exhausted and his brother had quit. To make matters worse, Farnese pays him only 500 gold pieces, which was basically pocket change. According to one account,  the Cardinal was happy with the Gallery and wanted to give Annibale a bonus. But he had this busybody advisor named Don Juan de Castro who decided to stiff Annibale by convincing the cardinal to deduct the costs of his food and lodging from his fee even though they originally were included in the contract. 

Poor Annibale goes into a deep depression and pretty much stops working, dying a few years later. 

However, the gallery was a huge success when it was revealed and became an enormous influence on artists who followed him, like Nicolas Poussin and Peter Paul Reubens. His work even became part of the tour of Italy young artists took to learn from the masters. BTW, the Farnese Palace is now the French Embassy in Rome!

OUTRO:

I hope you’ll try out a long look on your next museum visit! Just take a little time and let the art reveal itself.

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Thanks for joining me!