Francesco Albani

In the mid seventeenth century, Francesco Scannelli called Francesco Albani, along with Guido Reni, Domenichino and Guercino, one of the four evangelists of modern painting responsible for spreading the artistic precepts of the Carracci Academy. His distinctive artistic identity lay in his inventive interpretations of biblical stories and classical myths in lovely landscapes esteemed by contemporaries as visual counterparts to lyric poetry.

Born into a well-off family in Bologna in 1578, Albani began a painting apprenticeship in 1590 at age twelve with the Flemish Mannerist Denys Calvaert (c. 1540-1619). Apart from the basics of the trade, Calvaert imparted to his pupil a taste for elegantly posed figures and for painting works on copper panel, a practice Albani adopted throughout his career. After about five years, Albani abandoned his first teacher for the progressive Carracci Academy, following his friend Reni’s lead. Ludovico and his cousins Agostino and Annibale Carracci had formed the Academy in the early 1580s, and within a decade their vibrant naturalistic art had challenged the dominance of the older generation of Bolognese Mannerist painters, among them Calvaert. By the time the seventeen-year-old Albani joined, Ludovico had assumed control of the Academy after his cousins’ departure for Rome. Under Ludovico’s supervision, Albani painted his first public works in the city, demonstrating his new skills in large-scale frescoes and an altarpiece in the Oratory of San Colombano, whose powerful expressive figures reveal his study of Ludovico’s art. The year 1599 saw Albani’s entrance into the Compagnia dei Pittori (Company of Painters), the newly formed artists’ association, and the completion of his first dated altarpiece, the lovely Madonna and Child with Saints (Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale). Its composition imitates that of an earlier altarpiece by Annibale Carracci, translating the solemn, weighty forms of his model into a more delicate, sweeter idiom that became a distinguishing trait of his art.

Ready to widen his experience beyond Bologna, Albani moved to the papal capital in 1601, settling there for the next sixteen years. He arrived in time to see Annibale’s newly unveiled frescoed ceiling in the gallery of Palazzo Farnese, immediately hailed as ushering in a modern artistic resurgence along with Caravaggio’s Conversion of St Paul and Crucifixion of St Peter in the Cerasi Chapel of Santa Maria del Popolo. Preferring Annibale’s selective naturalism to Caravaggio’s veristic brand, Albani initially produced small easel pictures with primarily religious subjects, but his career benefited when Annibale’s heavy workload and declining health led him to enlist the young painter to supervise the completion of two key projects: the lunettes in oil of 1605-1613 to decorate the Cardinal-Nephew Pietro Aldobrandini’s private chapel in his Roman palace; and the fresco decoration of 1605-1606 in the Spanish banker Juan Enríquez de Herrera’s chapel in the national Spanish church, San Giacomo degli Spagnoli. Unfortunately, the original setting of each no longer survives, and while the lunettes assumed new life as independent paintings (Rome, Doria Pamphilj Gallery), the frescoes, which suffered damage, were detached and divided between two separate institutions (Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, and Barcelona, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya), and are less well-known today. Overseeing the Aldobrandini project, Albani contributed at least two of his own lunettes to the pair Annibale completed and oversaw other Carracci pupils’ execution of the remaining two. The Assumption of the Virgin and the Visitation reveal Albani’s immersion in the novel genre that Annibale Carracci had conceived to tell sacred and secular stories with small figures in a naturalistic but reengineered landscape. The Herrera project was likewise a formative experience, Albani first collaborating with Annibale and then working from his quick sketches to paint and, moreover, to guide more junior assistants in realizing an extensive cycle of monumental narrative scenes on the chapel walls along with further frescoes in the vault, all presenting a coherent ensemble that even if only partly executed by Annibale embodied his style.

Albani’s role in the Aldobrandini and Herrera decorations led to important, prestigious fresco commissions—all extant—for the Roman elite in the ensuing years, to wit three ceilings in the Palazzo Mattei di Giove (1606-1607), the walls and ceiling of the gallery in the Palazzo Giustiniani in Bassano Romano (1609-1610), the vault of the loggia in the Palazzo Verospi in Rome (1611-1612), and the vault decoration in the high altar chapel of Santa Maria della Pace (1612-1614). He also contributed a small fresco to Pope Paul V’s private chapel in the Palazzo Quirinale (1610), a decoration that Reni oversaw and mostly executed. Overall, these frescoes display Albani’s particular talent for inventive storytelling in picturing religious and secular themes. Stylistically, the classicizing compositions hew to Annibale Carracci’s example while greatly softening the severity of his hyper-ideal Roman manner. The illusionistic Giustiniani vault was among the first of the type and contributed to developing trends in ceiling design. Albani’s several canvases in oil from this period present subjects from ancient and contemporary literature with appeal for cultivated collectors, themes he would return to throughout his career, like the Ovidian myths of Diana and Actaeon or the Rape of Europa and the pastoral interlude of Erminia and the Shepherds from Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Il Gerusalemme Liberata. His personal life changed with his first marriage in 1613 and the birth of a child a year later that resulted in his wife’s death.

Returning to Bologna around 1617 as a now mature, established and successful artist, he soon remarried a Bolognese woman, his family expanding to as many as twelve children, ready models for the putti that became a defining, beloved feature of his art. With Ludovico Carracci’s death in 1619, Albani and his fellow artist Reni, also back in Bologna, dominated artistic life in the city, supervising rival workshops until 1642 when Reni died, and Guercino relocated his studio there. Over these four decades in Bologna, Albani painted as many as seventeen altarpieces for churches in and around the city, including an entire chapel decoration, and directed his assistants in an additional seven ecclesiastical works. Still in situ in San Bartolomeo, his celebrated Annunciation of 1632 which his biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia dubbed “of the beautiful angel” set a new paradigm for the theme, balancing a classically inspired statuesque Mary and a dynamic modern Gabriel, sweeping in with great urgency.

By the early 1630s, Albani had painted four major cycles of enchanting easel pictures with mythological and allegorical themes for eminent patrons, Cardinal Scipione Borghese (Rome, Galleria Borghese), Cardinal Maurizio of Savoy (Turin, Galleria Sabauda), Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga (Paris, Musée du Louvre), and the French nobleman, Jacques le Veneur, Count of Carrouges, who stood as godfather to the painter’s second son (Musée National du Château de Fontainebleau). For each, Albani invented novel imagery that embroidered on Ovid’s myths, as well as on ancient and contemporary literature, and that drew stylistically on Titian’s Bacchanals, which he was among the first painters in Rome to study. Featured prominently are graceful female nudes and charming cupids who enact the fables in the classical “locus amoenus,” an idyllic, serene landscape with sunny skies and shady groves. The great success of the four cycles induced Albani to develop a specialty in small-scale works of varied formats and supports with mythological and also devotional subjects. “Belle poesie” or beautiful poems as the theorist Giovan Battista Bellori referred to them in 1660, Albani’s cabinet pictures attracted clients across Italy and especially in France, the taste for his works reflected in their presence and steep valuation in the most distinguished collections, including Louis XIV’s.

Taking a pivotal role in transmitting the ideals of the Carracci Academy to a younger generation of painters and critics, Albani engaged with contemporary theoretical issues, drafting a treatise on painting from the 1620s, passages of the unfinished text known from Malvasia’s biography. In a classic-idealist view that affirmed his own talent, invention should reign as the primary part of painting above disegno and colore. In correspondence with Andrea Sacchi, however, he struck a middle ground in the critical debate about the Bamboccianti, painters of quotidian life, condemning the crudeness but appreciating the comedic qualities of their imagery. His reminiscences about the Carracci and his fellow Bolognese painters informed Malvasia’s and Bellori’s biographies. Conjoined with his reputation as an erudite painter, Albani was recognized as a generous and committed teacher. Among his numerous pupils, Sacchi, Pier Francesco Mola, and Carlo Cignani went on to forge successful careers.