Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn has cropped up in a lot of headlines and exhibitions over the past year. From a four-venue traveling print exhibition organized by the American Federation of Arts (currently at the Taft Museum of Art) to the largest private collection of his paintings going on view at the Norton Museum of Art, plus a record-breaking drawing sale and the rediscovery of a 1633 painting at the Rijksmuseum, Rembrandt’s presence is inescapable.

I can understand why Rembrandt draws so much fanfare. An Old Master of the Dutch Golden Age, he has name recognition within and beyond the art world that is rivaled by few. He has been dubbed one of the best within all of Western art history for his distinctive execution of light and realism.

Yet a generation earlier, another artist deserves as much pomp and circumstance: Annibale Carracci. Less familiar today, his contributions were equally groundbreaking, and there is one person definitely knew them well: Rembrandt himself.

Annibale Carracci, Self-Portrait with Other Figures (ca. 1593). Collection of the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.

The Carracci School

While Annibale and Rembrandt didn’t know one another, separated by a generation and half a continent, Rembrandt was familiar with and influenced by Annibale; he owned pieces by or attributed to Annibale, with some scholars even positing he borrowed and adapted from the Italian artist’s Christ of Caprarola (1597). 

Carracci was born in 1560 in Bologna, Italy, part of a creative family. In the early 1580s along with his brother Agostino Caracci and cousin Ludovico Caracci, Annibale opened a painters’ studio and school, the Accademia degli Incamminati, often referred to as the Accademia dei Carracci. Annibale, the most assertive of the three, helmed the school.

While not the first formal art academy to be established in Europe, it was still a first of its kind. The Carracci school trained its artists both in theory and practice and created an opportunity for them to draw from live models—an activity formerly banned by the Counter Reformation Catholic Church. It is considered the first major art school to prioritize life drawing and became the blueprint for other, later schools across the continent.

Annibale Carracci, Venus, Adonis, and Cupid (1590). Collection of the Museo del Prado, Madrid.

The Accademia dei Carracci under Annibale’s stewardship also marked another significant change in the trajectory of art history beyond its structure and curriculum, and that is the perception of artists themselves. The academy was foundational in the transition of artists being seen on par with musicians and poets with their own point of view and creative agency rather than simply artisans or craftspeople.

While this shift in perspective certainly didn’t happen overnight or even wholly in his lifetime, I’d like to think Annibale was well aware that he was planting a seed that would continue to grow and flourish—and it has. Though the crux of my belief that Annibale should be held in similar esteem to Rembrandt doesn’t specifically reside in his work creating an art academy, the import of his contributions to the status of artists overall cannot be understated. It is arguably unparalleled by any other artist of the Baroque period, and rivals that of painter and architect Giorgio Vasari whose seminal Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550) pioneered the artist biography as a cornerstone of understanding art history, helping raise the status and perspective on artists.

Left: Parmigianino, Madonna with the Long Neck (1535-40). Collection of the Uffizi, Florence. Right: Pontormo, The Deposition from the Cross (ca. 1525–28). Collection of the Church of Santa Felicita, Florence.

A New Age of Painting

To understand how revolutionary Annibale’s painting practice was, it’s important to first look at the prevailing styles and trends of the time.

The High Renaissance, dated roughly to between 1490 and 1527, prized compositional harmony, extreme technical skill, and an advanced degree of naturalism—all qualities exemplified by artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo. As the 16th century progressed, Mannerism took hold, identifiable by its elongated and dramatically posed figures, razor sharp perspective, and bold color palettes, with artists like El Greco and Parmigianino.

The three Carracci spurned the affectations and fakeness of Mannerism and instead championed a return to naturalism like that of Northern Italian Renaissance painters like Titian.

Annibale Carracci, The Butcher’s Shop (ca. 1583). Collection of Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford.

The work Annibale, along with his brother and cousin, helped lay the early foundations for the emergence of what is now recognized as the Baroque period alongside artists like Artemisia Gentileschi, Gaulli (Baciccio), and, of course, Caravaggio.

And though much of Annibale’s work reflects the dramatic yet unwaveringly naturalistic qualities that are associated with the period, three works stand out as truly radical. Two are dated to the early 1580s and are both titled The Butcher’s Shop, one belonging to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, the other to Christ Church Picture Gallery in Oxford. Each composition offers an unflinching look into a 16th-century butcher shop; rows of meat on hooks, entrails being removed, skin peeled back, a goat being pinned down by an attendant, likely to soon be dispatched.

Among the rather gruesome scene in the Christ Church version are tucked more moments of everyday life, a guard or soldier reaches into his coin purse as the butcher weighs out a piece of meat, and an old woman in the background waits patiently as an attendant reaches for her order. In the Kimbell’s iteration, one of the butchers pauses and breaks the fourth wall, meeting our the viewer’s gaze as though to see if we are waiting to make a purchase—still now more than 400 years later.

Annibale Carracci, The Butcher’s Shop (ca. 1582). Collection of the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth.

The third of these radical paintings is The Bean Eater dated to roughly the same period between 1580 and 1590. Blunt and uncompromising, it incorporates both elements of still life and portraiture, portraying a simple yet hearty meal spread and a common laborer or peasant mid-bite. These three paintings are some of the earliest Italian examples of genre paintings, a style of art that would later become commonplace in art history, focusing on the people, activities, and settings of everyday life.

Looking more closely at the execution of this trio of works, the brushwork is loose, particularly in many of the details such as the fat veining the meat in The Butcher Shop or the highlights on the collar of The Bean Eater. A radical departure from the meticulous rendering of his contemporaries, the three paintings mirror mid-19th century realism, and in my opinion would look quite at home alongside works by the likes of Gustav Courbet or Jean-François Millet who worked centuries after Annibale.

Annibale Carracci, Christ of Caprarola (1597). Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Rembrandt Link

The extent to which Annibale directly influenced Rembrandt is diluted due to the fact that Rembrandt was influenced by a whole host of artists and styles and eras—from his contemporaries to antiquities. To understand Rembrandt, one must look at what came before. Annibale is there, of central significance in the fabric of art history.

Foundational contributions have a way of disappearing into everything that follows them. The butcher’s shop paintings, the Bean Eater, the academy that changed how Europe thought about artists— these aren’t footnotes to someone else’s story. In light of the absolute deluge of recent exhibitions and events tied to Rembrandt, I don’t think it unfair to ask that at least a sliver of the contemporary spotlight be cast back on Annibale. His pioneering work both as a painter and art academy founder helped shape not only the trajectory of Western painting itself, but the foundation from which we consider artists and what they do.