Antonio Marziale Carracci

Around 1616 Antonio Carracci was painting scenes of the Flood on the walls of a room in the Quirinal Palace in Rome, then one of the pope's residences, and the room is still called the Room of the Flood. The same subject gave him the picture he is best known by today, The Flood, now in the Louvre. He was in his early thirties and had spent most of his working life in the shadow of a famous family.

He was born in Venice around 1583, the natural son of the painter and engraver Agostino Carracci and a courtesan named Isabella. After his father died in 1602 he went to Rome to work for his uncle Annibale, the painter of the Farnese gallery ceiling, and stayed with him through the illness that kept Annibale from working in his last years. When Annibale died in 1609, Antonio saw to his burial in the Pantheon, near Raphael.

The inheritance did not pass quietly. Antonio took over the studio, and another uncle, Giovanni Antonio, contested it by casting doubt on whether Antonio was really Agostino's son. Antonio went on working for Roman cardinals, among them Alessandro Peretti Montalto, a great-nephew of Pope Sixtus V, and died in Rome on 8 April 1618, aged about 35.