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Late Annibale and his workshop: invention, imitation and patronage

This develops an issue from the last chapter of the Carracci book (above), about the last years of Annibale’s career in which he was, through illness, unable physically to paint much, but was in huge demand from his patrons. It identifies two different strategies through which he used his most important pupils Domenichino and Francesco Albani to express his artistic ideas. Albani seems to have been employed as a capable manager, who could run a second Carracci workshop on projects such as the Herrera Chapel and the Aldobrandini lunettes, with relatively little input from Annibale. Domenichino by contrast seems to have been treated as Annibale’s real artistic heir, with Annibale doing much to promote his career. This leads to questions about Domenichino’s dependence on Annibale’s ideas, and his ability to create his own inventions – an issue already raised in the early Seicento, albeit maliciously by his rival Lanfranco – and to broader questions about the attitudes of contemporary patrons, such as the highly articulate Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, who employed both Albani and Domenichino, towards imitations and copies. Domenichino has been relatively neglected in recent years, and I hope to include a further study of his drawings (most of which are at Windsor) into a future project.