Annibale Carracci

[His] frescoes convey the impression of a tremendous joie de vivre, a new blossoming of vitality and of an energy long repressed. Rudolph Wittkower

The youngest of the Carracci clan, Annibale (1560–1609) was the most talented, a shy man who spoke with a stutter and never cared about his personal appearance (he was famously shabby). As a boy his natural talent soon attracted the attention of his artist cousin Ludovico, who convinced his father, a poor tailor that like his brother Agostino he was meant for bigger things. He was first apprenticed to a goldsmith, and studied with Ludovico and Bartolomeo Passarotti.

Most of all Annibale loved to draw. He took his pencil wherever he went, leaving behind hundreds of sketches drawn with free, fluid line, depicting everything from genre scenes of the simplest gestures of everyday life to hundreds of studies for his frescoes. Inspired by the Venetians, he adopted a new broken style of brushwork to capture movement and light. His ideal, sensitive landscapes would inspire his star pupil Domenichino, Poussin and other 17th-century masters.