Ludovico Carracci

Happy Birthday Ludovico Carracci!! Italian Baroque painter, born in 1555, Ludovico Carracci was a painter in Bologna. He was the oldest of two cousins who established the famed Bologonese Painting Academy. He taught his cousins Agostino and Annibale, who both went on to outshine his own painting. Their academy became the premier  training school for painting of the day. They encouraged their students to study nature and figure painting on a large scale. He continued to run it after the cousins left to travel and paint elsewhere. His work includes engravings, frescoes and altar pieces with wide gesturing figures and a soft light, some of which are still in existence today. The painting The Transfiguration, in the National Gallery of Art in Scotland, is a good example of his Baroque style. Note the handling of the fabric in simpler planes when compared to the same of Renaissance painters. Please be aware that the foreshortening of the prostrate figures of the disciples is quite complex. Foreshortening was first masteres by Michelangelo 100 years prior to Carracci.