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1 of 253523 objects
Annibale Carracci (Bologna 1560-Rome 1609)
A siren c. 1595
Black and white chalks on discoloured blue paper; partly pricked through | 52.3 x 38.4 cm (sheet of paper) | RCIN 902025
Annibale Carracci (Bologna 1560-Rome 1609)
A cartoon of a siren c. 1595
Annibale Carracci (Bologna 1560-Rome 1609)
A cartoon of a siren c. 1595
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A cartoon of a siren for the Camerino in Palazzo Farnese, Rome.
Annibale Carracci left Bologna in 1595 to work for Cardinal Odoardo Farnese in Rome. His first project there was to fresco the ceiling of Odoardo’s study, the Camerino in Palazzo Farnese, with scenes from myth and legend in a decorative surround. This was the full-scale working cartoon for a siren painted four times in triangles of the ceiling above the lunettes of the smaller sides of the room.
Annibale Carracci’s frescoes in the Palazzo Farnese, Rome, were the defining projects of his life. His decoration of the Galleria was the seminal work of the Baroque in the city, and broke him as an artist and a man. But before he began work in the Galleria he frescoed the adjoining Camerino, a relatively small room measuring 4.8 x 9.4 m (about 15 x 30 ft), probably Cardinal Odoardo Farnese’s study. The young Odoardo had begun negotiations to bring the Carracci to Rome in 1593. Annibale and his brother travelled south to sign a contract the following year, and after returning to sort his affairs in Bologna, Annibale arrived in Rome, alone, in the autumn of 1595.
Odoardo Farnese had first intended to have the Sala Grande of the palace frescoed with scenes from the life of his father, Alessandro, but this scheme was put in abeyance, and Annibale began work instead on the Camerino, completing that room by early 1597 Odoardo Farnese had corresponded with his librarian, Fulvio Orsini, during the summer of 1595 about the decorative programme for the room. At the centre of the coved ceiling was a large rectangular canvas of the Choice of Hercules (now in Capodimonte, Naples), flanked on the long sides by two oval frescoes also on the theme of Hercules, and on the short sides by roundels with the Farnese emblem of lilies. The perimeter of the ceiling is punctuated by six triangular spandrels curving over lunettes, two on each long wall and one on each short wall; the lunettes depict scenes from the stories of Odysseus, Perseus, and the Catanian brothers. The remainder of the vault is symmetrically divided by gilded stucco mouldings into a number of irregular fields, each frescoed with a monochrome arrangement of putti, sirens, satyrs, acanthus scrolls, masks, birds and decorative frameworks housing allegorical figures. -
Creator(s)
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Medium and techniques
Black and white chalks on discoloured blue paper; partly pricked through
Measurements
52.3 x 38.4 cm (sheet of paper)
Category
Object type(s)
Other number(s)
RL 2025Alternative title(s)
A cartoon of a siren
