Federico Barocci

Federico Barocci (or Baroccio) (1528-1612), Italian painter, was born at Urbino, Italy.

Related Topics:
1528 - 1612 - Italian - Painter - Urbino

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Barocci is one of the most important painters between Correggio and Caravaggio. His work fills an oft-overlooked period of art during the Counter Reformation and his work is that movement's highest artistic acheivement.

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His early career in Rome was fast and brilliant, inspired by Raphael, complimented by the aging Michelangelo, and mentored by Tadeo Zuccaro. But it was Barocci's embrace of the Counter Reformation that would shape his long and fruitful career. A key Reformer was Saint Philip Neri whose Oratorians sought to reconnect the spiritual realm with the lives of everyday people. It was Neri who commissioned Barocci later on to paint an altarpiece ("The Visitation") in his Chiesa Nuova. Neri is said to have ben moved to ecstasy by Barocci's accomplishment, which shows the Virgin and Elizabeth greeting each other as though within the context of daily Roman life.

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Barocci fled Rome claiming he was poisoned out of jealousy and crippled by what would be a life-long state of frail health. He returned to his native Urbino where he came under the patronage of Francesco Maria II della Rovere, duke of Urbino. The Ducal Palace can be seen in the background of his paintings, rendered in a forced perspective that seems a holdover from the Mannerists. Barocci, also a sensitive portraitist, immortalized the duke in a canvas which hangs in the Uffizi today.

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Though removed from the mechanism of artistic fame and influence that was Rome, Barocci managed to attract important commissions for his altarpieces throughout his lifetime. He also maintained a level of invention that defied his relative isolation. At some point he may have seen colored chalk/pastel drawings by Correggio, but it is Barocci's remarkable pastel studies which are the earliest examples the technique to survive. In pastels and in oil sketches (another technique he pioneered) Barocci's soft, opalescent renderings evoke the ethereal as could only be compared to Leonardo Da Vinci.

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Such studies were part of a complex process Barocci used to complete his alterpieces. Due to his fragile state, he needed to work in short periods throughout the day and the hard work of painting the altarpieces was saved for last. An elaborate series of steps leading up to the final product ensured its speed and success in execution. Barocci did innummerable sketches: gestural, compositional, figural studies (using models), lighting studies (using clay models), perspective studies, color studies, nature studies, etc. Today, over 2000 drawings by him are extant, more than any other artist from that period. Every detail was worked out in this way. A good example is his famed "Madonna del Popolo", also in the Uffizi. It is a vortex of color and vitality, made possible by the great variety of people, poses, perspectives, natural details, colors, lighting and atmospheric effects. There are many surviving drawings for "Popolo", from initial sketches to color studies of heads, to the final full size cartoon.

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Despite this painstaking process, Barocci's genius kept the brushstrokes passionate and liberated. More should be written about the singular radiance of the master's painting technique, in which a spiritual light seems to flicker as a jewel across faces, hands, drapery, and sky. This is important because Barocci's emotive brushwork was not lost on Peter Paul Rubens when he was in Italy. Rubens is known to have made a sketch of his dramatic "Martyrdom of St Vitale", in which the martyr's undulating flesh is the eye of another whirlwind of figures, gestures, and drama. Ruben's "The Martyrdom of St Livinus", for instance, seems to owe much to Barocci, from the putto with the pointing palm frond to the presence of dogs in the lower right corner.

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Barocci's swirling composition and the focus on the emotional and spiritual are elements that foreshadow the Baroque of Rubens. But even in Federico's Proto-Baroque "Beata Michelina" can see the makings of Bernini's High Baroque masterpiece "Esctasy of St Theresa." The ecsatic expression, the animated drapery, the oneness of the figure with the divine lightsource, the receiving hands?Barocci seems to have ushered in the palpable drama of the Baroque more completely than any other artist of his time.

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