Federico Barocci

Federico Barocci

Selfportrait by Federico Barocci (c. 1600)
Born c. 1526
Urbino
Died 1612
Urbino
Nationality Italian
Known for Painting
Notable work The Communion of the Apostles
Movement Renaissance

Federico Barocci (c. 1526 in Urbino 1612 in Urbino) was an Italian Renaissance painter and printmaker. His original name was Federico Fiori, and he was nicknamed Il Baroccio, which still in northwestern Italian dialects means a two-wheel cart drawn by oxen. His work was highly esteemed and influential, and foreshadows the Baroque of Rubens.

Early life and training

Annunciation (1592–96)
Oil on canvas, Santa Maria degli Angeli, Perugia.

He was born at Urbino, Duchy of Urbino, and received his earliest apprenticeship with his father, Ambrogio Barocci, a sculptor of some local eminence. He was then apprenticed with the painter Battista Franco in Urbino. He accompanied his uncle, Bartolomeo Genga to Pesaro, then in 1548 to Rome, where he was worked in the pre-eminent studio of the day, that of the Mannerist painters, Taddeo and Federico Zuccari.

Mature work in Rome and Urbino

After passing four years at Rome, he returned to his native city, where his first work of art was a St. Margaret executed for the Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament. He was invited back to Rome by Pope Pius IV to assist in the decoration of the Vatican Belvedere Palace at Rome, where he painted the Virgin Mary and infant, with several Saints and a ceiling in fresco, representing the Annunciation.

During this second sojourn, while completing the decorations for the Vatican, Barocci fell ill with intestinal complaints. He suspected that a salad which he had eaten had been poisoned by jealous rivals. Fearing his illness was terminal, he left Rome in 1563; four years later he was said to experience a partial remission after prayers to the Virgin.[1] Barocci henceforth often complained of frail health, though he remained productive for nearly four decades more. While he is described by contemporaries as personally somewhat morose and hypochondriacal, his paintings are lively and brilliant. Although he continued to have major altarpiece commissions from afar, he never returned to Rome, and was mainly patronized in his native city by Francesco Maria II della Rovere, duke of Urbino. The Ducal Palace can be seen in the background of his paintings, rendered in a forced perspective that seems a holdover from Mannerism.

Nativity, 1597, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid

While Barocci was removed from Rome, the fulcrum of artistic fame and influence, he continued to innovate in his style. At some point he may have seen colored chalk/pastel drawings by Correggio, but Barocci's remarkable pastel studies are the earliest examples of the technique to survive. In pastels and in oil sketches (another technique he pioneered) Barocci's soft, opalescent renderings evoke the ethereal. Such studies were part of a complex process Barocci used to complete his altarpieces. An organized series of steps leading up to the final product ensured its speed and success in execution. Barocci did innumerable sketches: gestural, compositional, figural studies (using models), lighting studies (using clay models), perspective studies, color studies, nature studies, etc. Today, over 2,000 drawings by him are extant. Every detail of his subsequent cartoons for canvases was worked out in this way. A good example is his famed Madonna del Popolo (Uffizi). It is a vortex of color and vitality, made possible by the great variety of people, poses, perspectives, natural details, colors, lighting and atmospheric effects. There are many surviving drawings for the Madonna del Popolo, from initial sketches to color studies of heads, to the final full size cartoon. Despite this painstaking process, Barocci's genius kept the brushstrokes passionate and liberated, and a spiritual light seems to flicker as a jewel across faces, hands, drapery, and sky.

Federico Barocci, Madonna del Popolo, 1579

Barocci's embrace of the Counter Reformation would shape his long and fruitful career. By 1566, he joined a lay order of Capuchins, an offshoot of Franciscans.[2] He may have been influenced by Saint Philip Neri, whose Oratorians sought to reconnect the spiritual realm with the lives of everyday people. Neri, who was somewhat ambivalent about the accumulating richness of his Santa Maria in Vallicella, commissioned two completed works from Barocci, the pre-eminent artist of these large pious altarpieces: The Visitation (1583-6) and Presentation of the Virgin (1593–94). Neri is said to have been moved to ecstasy by Barocci's accomplishment in the former painting, which shows the Virgin and Elizabeth greeting each other.

In Urbino, where he painted a Descent from the Cross for the cathedral of San Lorenzo at Perugia. He again visited Rome during the papacy of Gregory XIII when he painted two admirable pictures for the Chiesa Nuova, representing the Visitation of the Virgin Mary to Elisabeth and the Presentation in the Temple, and for the Chiesa della Minerva, a Last Supper.[3]

Critical assessment and legacy

The artist biographer Giovanni Bellori, the Baroque equivalent of Giorgio Vasari, considered Barocci to be among the finest painters of his time. Barocci's emotive brushwork was not lost on Peter Paul Rubens when he was in Italy. Rubens is known to have made a sketch of his dramatic Martyrdom of St Vitale, in which the martyr's undulating flesh is the eye of another whirlwind of figures, gestures, and drama. Also, Rubens' The Martyrdom of St Livinus seems to owe much to Barocci, from the putto with the pointing palm frond to the presence of dogs in the lower right corner. Among the painters and artists who worked under Barocci are Antonio Cimatori (Visacci), Ventura Mazza, Antonio Viviani (il Sordo di Urbino), Giovanni Andrea Urbani, Alessandro Vitali, and finally Felice and Vincenzo Pellegrini. Barocci also had many who followed or were strongly influenced by his style, including Nicolo Martinelli (il Trometta), Giovanni Battista Lombardelli, Domenico Malpiedi, Cesare & Basilio Maggeri, Filippo Bellini, Giovanni Laurentini (Arrigoni), Giorgio Picchi, Giovanni Giacomo Pandolfi, Pietro Paolo Tamburini, Terenzio d’Urbino (il Rondolino), Giulio Cesare Begni, Benedetto Marini, Girolamo Cialdieri, Giovanni Battista Urbinelli, Alfonso Patanazzi, Gian Ortensio Bertuzzi, Cesare Franchi (il Pollino), Silla Piccinini, Benedetto Bandiera, Matteuccio Salvucci, Simeone Ciburri, Pietro Rancanelli, Onofrio Marini, Alessandro Brunelli, and Francesco Baldelli[4]

Barocci's swirling composition and the focus on the emotional and spiritual are elements that foreshadow the Baroque of Rubens. But even in Federico's Proto-Baroque Beata Michelina can see the makings of Bernini's High Baroque masterpiece Ecstasy of St Theresa.

Partial anthology of works

Painting Date Site Image link
Martyrdom of St Sebastian 1557 Urbino Cathedral
Madonna di San Simone 1567 Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino
Deposition 1567-69 Perugia Cathedral
Rest on the Flight to Egypt 1570 Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican
Nativity 1597 Museo del Prado, Madrid
The Vision of St Francis San Francesco, Urbino
Madonna del Popolo 1575-79 Uffizi, Florence
Entombment 1580-2 Chiesa della Croce, Senigallia
Martyrdom of San Vitale
Circumcision Paris
Annuciation 1592-96 Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Assisi, Perugia
Aeneas' Flight from Troy 1598 Galleria Borghese, Rome Image:BarocciAeneas.jpg
St Jerome 1598 Galleria Borghese, Rome &de:Bild:Barocci2.jpg
Portrait of Francisco II della Rovere 1572 Uffizi, Florence
Christ and Mary Magdalen (Noli me tangere) 1590 Gemaldegalerie, Munich
Entombment (etching) 1579–1582 Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Quintilia Fischeri c. 1600 National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Annunciation (etching)
St Francis receives the stigmata (drawing) Accademia Carrara, Bergamo
Madonna with Sts Simon and Jude Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino
Vocation of Saints Peter and Andrew 1586 Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium
Madonna and Child with the Infant John the Baptist and St Joseph (Madonna with the Cat) c. 1575 National Gallery, London
Communion of the Apostles c. 1603~1608 Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome


References

  1. Barocci
  2. Walter Friedlander, Burlington Magazine (1964), p.16-17 reviewing Harold Olsen's book.
  3. Bryan, Michael (1886). Robert Edmund Graves, ed. Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, Biographical and Critical (Volume I: A-K). York St. #4, Covent Garden, London; Original from Fogg Library, Digitized May 18, 2007: George Bell and Sons. p. 83.
  4. Catalogo dei quadri che si conservano nella Pinacoteca Vannucci in Perugia, by Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, (1903) page 60.
External video
Focus on: Barocci, (6:16) with four additional videos, National Gallery
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