The Heritage of Caravaggio and the Carracci
While the Mannerist culture was exhausting itself in subjects so complex as to verge on the incomprehensible, a taste for a more direct, rustic realism was opening up in Lombardy and Emilia. Annibal Carracci with his Bean Eater (Mangeur de fèves) and his Butcher's Shop (Boucherie) was perfectly in tune with the 1590's, as was Caravaggio with his still lifes. The Council of Trent was hoping for a militant style of painting that would be both spectacular and intelligible to all. This realism was not an end in itself but a stage in the quest for an expression that was more clear and harmonious.
Caravaggio refused to take pupils and the European phenomenon known as Caravaggism resulted from the vogue experienced by his favourite subjects when they were taken up again by his followers after his death. One of these followers, Antiveduto Gramatica, bore witness to the power of this influence in a previously unknown painting, the great discovery of the exhibition: La Sainte Famille au dévidoir (The Holy Family at the Reel). Plays of light and shade and exchanges of looks and glances had, however, always influenced painters who were remote from the Caravaggesque aesthetic such as Guido Reni and Le Guerchin. For their part, the Carracci (Annibal and his cousins) founded an academy at Bologna and sought to revive Italian history painting. Given the influence of this academy and its pupils, active in Bologna and throughout Italy, they can be considered to have succeeded.
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