| Giacomo Cavedoni is notable for his singular fusion of Annibale, and Ludovico Carracci's teachings to achieve a robust personal style. Cavedoni's father was a minor painter who gained a three year stipend for Giacomo to study painting in Bologna with Bernardo Baldi and Annibale Carracci in 1591. After Annibale's departure for Rome in 1595, Cavedoni became Ludovico's chief assistant. In 1609 Cavedoni is documented in Rome assisting Guido Reni. A trip to Venice presumably took place between 1612 and 1613. He gained Ludovico Carracci's title as head of the Carracci Academy upon the latter's death in 1619. Despite his long life, Cavedoni's career was brief. The tragic loss of his wife and children in the plague of 1630 evidently broke his spirit. Unable to paint, he lived in great poverty until his death in 1660. Cavedoni's early attempts to combine Annibale's sculptural forms with Ludovico's planar surfaces are evident in his earliest documented work, St. Stephen in Glory dated 1601, Modena, Galleria Estense as well as in his Deposition Santuario di Caravaggio and Death of Peter Martyr Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale. Done before 1609, these give way to a more monumental classicism after his Roman trip, combined with a glowing sense of color. The highpoint of Cavedoni's career is reached around 1614, with such pictures as Adoration of the Kings dated 1614, Bologna. |
