CARACCI, ANNIBALE, brother to Agostino, was born at Bologna in 1560, and died in 1609. From his cousin Ludovico, who first put the pencil into his hands, he not only learned the best principles of the art of painting, but caught an ardent ambition to excel in its various branches. For this purpose he studied, with keen emulation, the works of Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese, at Venice, and those of Corregio at Parma. The genius displayed in his early productions excited great expectations of his future eminence. His fame soon extended itself to Rome ; and he was invited by the Cardinal Farnese, to paint that gallery, which be came afterwards so well known through all Europe. In this magnificent undertaking, he spent ten years of assiduous labour. The Farnesian Gallery, while its colours withstand the influence of time, will remain an honourable monument of the talents of the painter, while it throws a shade of perpetual infamy over the memory of his employer, who could requite such talent, laboriously and successfully exerted for ten years, with the paltry sum of five hundred crowns. Uniform vigour of execution is the distinguishing excellence of this celebrated work ; an excellence, however, which is most unhappily contrasted by its imbecility and incongruity of conception. " If impropriety of ornament," says Mr Fuseli, a little too strongly, " were to be fixed by defini tion, the subjects of the Farnese Gallery might be quoted as the most decided instances. The artist may admire the splendour, the exuberance, the concentration of powers, displayed by Annibale Caracci, but the man of sense must lament their misapplication in the Far nese Gallery." Annibale availed himself of his resi
dence in Rome, by studying the antique statues, the bas so-relievos, and the compositions of Raphael. These models induced him to change his Bolognese manner, which had much of Corregio in it, for one which was indeed more learned, but, both in design and in colour ing, more dry and leis natural. In comparing Annibale with the other Caraccis, it may be observed, that while he was perhaps inferior to Ludovico and Agostino in re fined taste, sensibility, and judgment, he surpassed them both in the freedom, the warmth, the energy and origi nality of conception, by which true genius is charac terised. In his paintings there is little of that delicacy which diffuses through the soul a silent pensive delight ; but the grandeur of his designs, the liveliness of his ex pression, the vigour and firmness of his execution, burst in one powerful effect upon the mind, and hurry it away in a kind of impetuous admiration. lie painted por traits and history ; but it was in landscape that he chief ly excelled. The form of his trees is peculiarly grand ; and Iic,okh he does not appear to have understood com pletely the principles and doctrines of the chino obscu uo, and his local colours are not always commendable, yet " ill) painter seems to have been more universal, more easy, more certain in every thing he did, nor more generally approved, than Annibale Caracci." (f.t.)