The Artist, the Studio & the Model: The Carracci to Courbet. 1

The Carracci Academy & the Male Model.

“They [the Carracci] founded schools; indeed, it is true to say that schools as we know them today began with the Carracci- those schools I mean, in which a careful study of the living model came first and almost entirely replaced the unremitting study of every branch of art, of which the study of the model is only part.” Eugene Delacroix.¹

Founded in Bologna around 1582 by three members of the Carracci family, Ludovico and his cousins Annibale and Agostino, and usually called the Accademia degli Incamminati, or simply the Accademia d’ Carracci, this private organisation made the drawing of the male nude central to their practice.² Completely undogmatic unlike other studios such as Guido Reni’s, they believed in the analytical teaching of art within a training program. The Carracci drew from antique sculpture as well as after works by Renaissance masters. Anatomy was extremely important although they had a problematic relationship with doctors and surgeons; Agostino warned against painters poking around in the body like doctors. Despite this, drawing from the live model, the ‘academy’, was the most important aspect of their workshop operation. A student drawing at Princeton gives some idea of how teaching from the live model was conducted in the Carracci school.³ One of the inscriptions reads “Agostino makes a large studio of the leg that poses, or rests.” Another states that “the leg loses the serpentine angle or direction.” This suggests that the student was being corrected by his teachers, a common way of teaching art in the 17th century. Although Delacroix’s critical observation about the Carracci school would imply that they slavishly copied the model in an academic way, their drawings do suggest an equally important inclination towards truth and not simply “academies”- see below- where an almost dogmatic attitude towards drawing the male body would prevail. A good example of Annibale’s matter of fact attitude towards drawing the nude can be seen in a chalk study in Venice capturing the body in movement

1Journal, 22^nd February, 1860.

2The most important book on the Carracci Academy remains Carl Goldstein, Visual Fact over Verbal Fiction: A Study of the Carracci and the Criticism, Theory, and Practice of Art in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Also the references to the Carracci in Goldstein’s Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

3Old Master Drawings from the Collection of Joseph F. McCrindle, (Art Museum, Princeton University, 1992), no. 25.

4Various, The Drawings of Annibale Carracci, (National Gallery of Washington, 1999-2000), no. 3.