Anyone familiar with the history of Bolognese classical Baroque art will appreciate the challenge of assembling a catalogue raisonné of the paintings and drawings of the Carracci, a family whose illustrious members included not only Ludovico, founder of a new school of painting, but also his younger cousins, Annibale and Agostino. The fact that Ludovico was the most unconventional and least understood of the Carracci clan makes Babette Bohn’s long-awaited, comprehensive, and lavishly illustrated monograph most welcome. Part of the series L’Arte del Disegno, it is a significant addition to modern critical studies of the Carracci and their drawings in the tradition of such international scholars as Rudolf Wittkower, Heinrich Bodmer, Anthony Blunt, Denis Mahon, Andrea Emiliani, Sydney J. Freedberg, Diane DeGrazia, Gail Feigenbaum, Catherine Loisel-Legrand, and Alessandro Brogi. Bohn has produced a masterful and significant contribution to the study of the Carracci in particular and to the art of early modern Bologna in general.

The first three chapters of Ludovico Carracci and the Art of Drawing are directed to specialists and non-specialists alike. In her preface, Bohn, who teaches Baroque art history to undergraduates, acknowledges the need for an accessible, English-language overview of Bolognese artistic culture, given the importance of the Bolognese school in the development of Western classicism. The opening chapters offer an introduction to the socio-cultural climate of early modern Bologna and present an overview of Ludovico’s oeuvre, followed by an important discussion on Bolognese graphic production. Later chapters examine Ludovico’s chalk and pen drawings. The main body of the monograph, the catalogue raisonné of Ludovico’s drawings, follows these essays.

Bohn’s introductory, contextual overview of Bolognese artistic culture recalls the importance of the city’s religious orders, especially the Dominicans; the influence of the city’s miracle-working images, such as the Madonna di San Luca, believed to have been painted by St. Luke himself, and their place in the religious life of the city; and the significant role of art in the devotional life of the Bolognese as defined by Tridentine reform and Bologna’s Bishop Gabriele Paleotti. The chapter includes a brief discussion of Bolognese women artists, touching on such religious figures as the fifteenth-century Poor Clare Caterina de’Vigri (beatified in 1592; canonized in 1712), and secular female artists, including Properzia de’ Rossi (a sculptor who warranted a separate biography in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists) and Ludovico’s contemporary, the highly successful painter Lavinia Fontana, daughter and pupil of Prospero Fontana. Ludovico also received some artistic training from Prospero, but little encouragement.

Bohn, who has made many important contributions to feminist art historical studies, highlights the work of Bolognese women artists and intellectuals, among them Antonia Pinelli (d. 1644), whom Ludovico trained. Pinelli was overshadowed by her more famous and talented contemporary Elisabetta Sirani, who had a brief but brilliant career, and who may have had as many as thirteen female pupils, “making her the first European woman to form a school of painting outside the convent” (19). It would have been useful to include some perspective on how Bolognese women artists were able to have successful careers in an artistic milieu largely dominated by men. In the same context, there might also have been some brief discussion of such female patrons as the Blessed Elena Dugioli dall’Olio (b. 1472), who is associated with the commission of Raphael’s St. Cecilia Altarpiece (c. 1513–16) for S. Giovanni in Monte. In this regard, David Drogin’s essay on Bologna in Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance: The Northern Courts, edited by Charles M. Rosenberg (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), will offer the English-speaking reader another perspective on the political and cultural scene in Bologna during the sixteenth century.

It would have been helpful if Bohn’s informative discourse on women artists had been matched by a similar overview of male painters who played a significant role in shaping Bologna’s artistic culture during the later sixteenth century, e.g., Amico Aspertini, Bagnacavallo, Biagio Pupini, Girolamo da Carpi, Nicolo dell’Abate, Prospero Fontana, Pellegrino Tibaldi, Orazio Samacchini, and the Fleming Denys Calvaert. Some brought artistic influences to Bologna from other regions, and in many cases their influence was as diverse as their backgrounds. The graphic production of some of these artists is discussed in chapter 3.

Chapter 2, “Ludovico Carracci pittore,” is a survey of Ludovico’s career. Ludovico’s seemingly uneven, unconventional productivity has been noted by a handful of twentieth-century scholars, and Freedberg even characterized Carracci’s art as the product of a “faulted genius” (Circa 1600: A Revolution of Style in Italian Painting, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1983, 82). It is possible that Ludovico’s relative isolation in the university town of Bologna contributed to his artistic character. Carlo Cesare Malvasia (1616–93), the most important contemporary biographer of the Carracci and chronicler of the Bolognese school, relates that Ludovico traveled to Florence around 1575, where he probably entered the workshop of Federico Zuccaro, then completing frescoes in the Duomo’s cupola. With the exception of travels to the northern Italian cities of Parma, Mantua, and Venice (and the brief sojourn in Florence), however, Ludovico remained in Bologna, unlike his cousins Annibale, who left for a career in Rome in 1595, and Agostino, who joined Annibale there in 1597. Ludovico made a brief trip to Rome in 1602, but then returned to Bologna. Perhaps Ludovico’s “faulted genius” had something to do with his isolation in a city where cultural and political pressures differed from those of Florence, Venice, and Rome.

In 1582, before Annibale and Agostino went to Rome, the three Carracci established an art school, often described as an academy, in Bologna. Located in Ludovico’s house, the school provided young artists with the opportunity to study from live models. As Bohn points out, the Carracci clearly raised Renaissance principles of naturalism to a new level, largely by means of observation and a willingness to record the realities of daily life, elements of which were then translated into secular and sacred narratives. Bohn observes that during the 1590s, Ludovico’s representations of men were among his most naturalistic creations, both physically and emotionally, whereas his depictions of women, treated with greater reserve, were less emotionally accessible and were probably not derived from nature. Ludovico’s women do, in fact, seem detached and even, in some cases, mannequin-like. Yet, the same observation might be made regarding many, if not most, of the images of women by northern and central Italian sixteenth-century male painters, who distinguished gender in this way. It was not uncommon for a studio garzone to morph into a female figure.

Bohn views Ludovico as being more sympathetic than his contemporaries in the depiction of women. She cites his Susanna and the Elders (c. 1598, now Banca Popolare dell’Emilia Romagna, Modena) and the studies for it (cat. nos. 135–37) as an indication of his desire to step outside traditional, eroticized Western representations of women by emphasizing female virtue, and states that in so doing, Ludovico was being more faithful to the meaning of the Old Testament text. Yet, it is not clear that Ludovico’s representation of Susanna evinces any particular sympathy for her plight. The painting offers a powerful scenario of imminent, violent rape: one elder’s strong, dark hand grasps Susanna’s lighter, expansive left thigh; the other elder grips her left hand in an attempt to pull or hold her down. Susanna’s semi-recumbent posture (she is viewed from below) encourages the viewer to imagine her genitalia. The work clearly demonstrates Ludovico’s willingness to create exactly the same kind of erotic display of and titillation by the nude female body demonstrated by innumerable male painters of his generation and earlier. Bohn also suggests that Susanna’s pose is derived from Michelangelo’s Eve in the Sistine Temptation and Expulsion (1508–12) fresco, thereby casting Susanna in the role of a second Eve, one who resists temptation more successfully than the original Eve.

Unfortunately, this observation is not convincing. Susanna’s body is more prone than Michelangelo’s Eve, her legs are parted and lifted, and her left arm is pulled back, not raised. Although Bohn suggests that Susanna’s brightly lit, nude body, placed against a dark background that includes the male elders, depicts divine illumination and Susanna’s moral superiority, the dramatic lighting may simply have been the artist’s device for contrasting the woman’s whiteness—an attribute of purity and the feminine—against the “darkness” of the men who attack her. If so, Ludovico was engaging in an established tradition of male and female representation. Furthermore, the rendering of the protagonists’ anatomy makes the Susanna exactly the kind of picture that Bohn describes as typical of the artist’s work dating from the 1590s: the males are among Ludovico’s most physically and emotionally natural creations, while the females are not studied from nature, but are more physically and emotionally generalized.

Bohn concludes her discussion of the Bolognese artistic milieu with a brief but highly informative chapter on the unique role that the creation and collection of prints and finished drawings played in sixteenth-century Bologna. She takes the novel approach of viewing the Carracci draftsmen in this context, which had its roots in Bologna’s rich humanistic traditions, rather than acceding to the more traditional idea that the Carracci were revolutionaries reacting against mannerist practices and aesthetics. Prints were appreciated as facsimiles of drawings, and were considered to be finished works as early as Marcantonio Raimondi’s day, and, later, in Parmigianino’s elegant works. During the last third of the century, Bartolomeo Passarotti created finished pen-and-ink drawings of heads and portraits, many of Bolognese patrons. These drawings, some of which looked like prints, were much the rage, and they suggest a reversal of values, i.e., an admiration for prints masquerading as drawings that in turn leads to an admiration of drawings masquerading as prints. Passarotti’s famous museum, containing the artist’s collection of cameos, drawings, prints, paintings, medals, and other artistic curiosities, was also popular. Malvasia informs us that the Bolognese were avid collectors of drawings by the Carracci (Malvasia himself owned at least 300, many of which were finished), and the interest in such works may explain the production of such precious and beautiful sheets as Ludovico’s Holy Family at the Table Served by an Angel (cat. no. 238; c. 1608–10), executed in pen and brown ink on vellum, and signed by the artist in gold.

The monograph’s penultimate chapter discusses Ludovico’s chalk drawings, while the final chapter considers his pen drawings. The pen drawings are more numerous, and can often be associated with known paintings and prints. In many cases, Ludovico’s drawings in both media have been mistakenly assigned to Annibale or Agostino, primarily due to the traditional view of many scholars and connoisseurs that Ludovico was the weaker draftsman. (A perusal of auction catalogues still shows a bias toward Annibale.) Bohn has been instrumental in reestablishing Ludovico’s reputation as an important draftsman of red-and-black chalk drawings, a view she first articulated some twenty years ago in an article in Master Drawings (22, no. 4, 1984: 405–25). Ludovico’s production of such drawings tapered off around 1600, and Bohn suggests that this shift away from direct studies after nature in all media may have been related to the departure of Agostino and Annibale in the 1590s and their deaths in 1602 and 1609, respectively. The deaths of several like-minded Bolognese intellectuals and humanists—Cardinal Paleotti, Carlo Sigonio, Ulisse Aldrovandi, and Giulio Cesare Croce—all of whose work mirrored or encouraged Ludovico’s art, may also have influenced him. In addition, Bohn notes, Ludovico may have decided to return to a mannerist aesthetic, the maniera statuina that the Carracci so abhorred earlier, because the style was still favored by local patrons. In the context of a broader cultural milieu, Bologna, it seems, became less hospitable to the world of naturalism. Bohn also considers the possibility that Ludovico’s design process around the turn of the century was less rigorous than Annibale’s, whose preparatory designs were quite extensive, but not as spontaneous as that of Caravaggio, who apparently did not use drawings in preparation for a painting.

In the chapter on pen drawings, Bohn offers a synopsis of Ludovico’s design process as exemplified in the studies for the 1592 Supper of St. Peter in the House of Simon Coriarius (cat. nos. 80–83), where the compositional design, executed in washes, clearly shows the artist’s concern for tonal ranges. For this same composition, individual components were elaborated upon in a splendid red chalk study (cat. no. 82) that gives greater clarity to the protagonists and their postures. As Bohn points out, artists’ design processes do not necessarily follow a consistent pattern, and she interestingly likens Ludovico’s studies for the Capitoline St. Francis (cat. no. 22) of c. 1585–86 to the “circuitous” routes undertaken later by the younger Guercino.

The monograph concludes with the catalogue raisonné of drawings, which is divided into three sections: autograph drawings, doubtful attributions, and rejected attributions. Here, after studies spanning more than twenty-five years, Bohn’s connoisseurship comes to full fruition. Some Carracci scholars will doubtless take issue with specific attributions. Nonetheless, in bringing together in one volume both a thoughtful consideration of the draftsman Ludovico Carracci and a collection of 319 works, Bohn has provided a rich resource for students of the artist and his era.