Ludovico Carracci

(Bologna, 1555-1619)

The path of Arcangeli’s critical inquiry, after Amico Aspertini, touches on Ludovico, Agostino and Annibale Carracci. Of the three artists, Arcangeli chose Ludovico, “certainly not because he is more gifted than Annibale, for if anything it is legitimate to argue the contrary; nor because it is impossible to root for a ‘cultured’ poetics rather than a poetics of immediacy.

Actually, in the context of this discourse, Ludovico is the artist who acts as a crucial link … between Aspertini and Crespi, in favour of a life experienced in the everyday, of a direct relationship between the work of art and the viewer; in favour of the existential grounds that are at the heart of what we are proposing’ ...

It is no longer about Wiligelmo’s ‘physical body’, Vitale’s ‘action’, Aspertini’s ‘imagination’. Ludovico’s profound driving force is ‘sentiment’, a certain leaning towards pathos rooted in a frank religious feeling which – and this is rather singular – finds its impetus in the prudent and modern norms of someone who had lived through the Council of Trent, Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti; who, instead of deriving a stringent dogma from it, drew on it to affirm the necessity of ‘verisimilitude’ in sacred themes…