Cristo muerto

Annibale Carracci was barely into his twenties in Bologna when he laid the dead Christ down like this, feet toward us, the whole body punched into deep foreshortening so the head falls away small and far. He was borrowing openly. Andrea Mantegna had pulled the same steep trick a century earlier with his own dead Christ, and Carracci had almost certainly seen it. What the young painter adds is the plain daylight cruelty of it, the greyed skin and the slack weight, at a moment when Bolognese painting had drifted into elegant, weightless mannerism. You can see the argument he is starting on the panel itself, that a body should look like a body. It is one of the earliest things he made, and the studio he would soon run with his brother and cousin turned that same insistence on the real into the training ground for the next Roman generation.