Agostino Carracci

Agostino Carracci was one of three members of a single Bolognese family who changed the course of Italian painting. With his younger brother Annibale and their cousin Ludovico, he founded an academy in Bologna in the 1580s that sent students back to drawing from life and from nature, a deliberate cure for what they saw as the tired artificiality of late Mannerism.

Agostino was the learned, many-sided one. A superb engraver as much as a painter, he spread the compositions of the great masters across Europe through his prints, and he was steeped in poetry and science, the intellectual of the workshop.

His most famous work was done alongside Annibale in Rome, the ceiling of the Farnese Gallery, a riot of classical gods in love that became a model for Baroque decoration. The two brothers, close and competitive, fell out badly during the project, and Agostino left Rome for the court of Parma. He died there in 1602, only in his mid-40s, working on frescoes he never finished.