Assunzione della Vergine

Annibale Carracci painted this Assumption in Bologna in the late 1580s, when he was still a young man testing what he could do. You can see him working through the Venetian painters he admired, loading the picture with warm colour and loose, broken brushwork rather than the cooler polish then fashionable in central Italy. The Virgin is swept upward on a bank of cloud while the apostles crowd her empty tomb below, some reaching after her, some staring up. It is busy and physical and full of movement. A few years after this, Annibale went south to Rome and painted the great ceiling of the Farnese gallery, one of the works that helped turn European painting toward the Baroque. This earlier altarpiece catches him before that, still absorbing Venice on his home ground in Bologna.