GOING FOR BAROQUE Into the Bin - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Annibale Carracci
A Domestic Scene,
ca. 1582-84
Pen and black ink, gray
and brown wash, 11% x
9'/sin. (29x23.3 cm)
Purchase, Mrs. Vincent
Astor and Mrs. Charles
Payson Gift, Harris
Brisbane Dick Fund, and
Rogers Fund, 1972
(1972.133.2)
delights
of a basket of crayfish,
one of which has, predictably,
fastened its pincers
on the
boy's finger. The girl laughs,
the boy
cries. The
drawing
was
clearly
intended to respond
to
Michelangelo's challenge,
but it did so by adding
a further
layer,
for it includes both a crying
and a laughing figure,
thus giving
brilliant demonstration of Sofonisba's mastery of contrast
ing physiognomic expressions.
It is also anecdotal on the most
engaging
level. Small wonder
that the was drawing
sent to Duke Cosimo de' Medici in Florence for his admiration.
There can be little question
that Sofonisba's
drawing provided
Annibale with his point
of
departure
and that this relationship
was meant to increase its interest. In fact, the Farnese
family?patrons
of Annibale?owned a version of his painting
as well as Sofonisba's
drawing.
Annibale wanted
something more, however, than the depiction
of an action frozen in time.
He shows us the moments before the child is scratched, thereby embedding
in his work a
concept of time?of a narrative that unfolds in front of us and in which the conclusion is
implied
rather than depicted.
The viewer for which it was destined was
obviously expected
to be sophisticated
and doubtless would also have admired the way Annibale
employed
a
rapid, informal manner of painting
to enhance the impression
of spontaneity.
The
highlights
of the girl's
sleeve are painted
wet into wet, the red ribbon in her hair
suggested
rather than
described in detail, and the cat is brushed in so as thinly
to appear almost unfinished.
By
comparison, Caravaggio's
work looks both
staged
and frozen, which reminds us of the
degree
to which an impression
of spontaneity
is a calculated narrative strategy: Annibale
has
appropriated
the studio practice
of the oil sketch and combined it with the rich brush
work he learned from Venetian
painting
to create a picture
at once
seemingly spontaneous
and finished.
Caravaggio's
and Annibale's pictures
both involve secular themes, for which the imple
mentation of naturalism was less problematic?at
least in the minds of late-sixteenth-century
critics.
By 1590 or so?the date he painted
Two Children
Teasing
a Cat?Annibale would not
have considered
employing
such a naturalistic mode in a religious painting.
He had, so to
speak,
"been there and done that" a decade earlier and gotten mightily
burned
by
both critics
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