Holy Women at Christ’s Tomb
Annibale Carracci
ANNIBALE CARRACCI, 1598. OIL ON CANVAS.
Lauded and lusted after by great collectors over millennia, it stayed in the single commissioning family for most of its life, rejecting offers from the King of England for its possession before finding its permanent home in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1836. Annibale Carracci’s monumental work was an object of desire not simply for its aesthetic beauty or holy reverence but for its position as the synthesis of an era. Carracci is regarded as one of the founders of Baroque, returning to the classical monumentality of early Renaissance masters but adding in a vivid and dynamic lifeblood. Here, he took the styles of the day from across northern and southern Italy and united them into something that felt remarkably new. Classical sculpture, the cartoons of Rafael and the bright Roman frescoes of the 1400s meet in a work that rejected the more naturalistic vogues that Caravaggio was pioneering and brought back a sense of dramatics to religious art that would sustain for the hundreds of years after his passing.