In Bologna, he opened, together with his cousin Lodovico Carracci and brother Agostino, the Academy of the Incamminati or Desiderosi, later called the "School of the Eclectics" and the "School of the Carracci".
The work is a self-portrait, and the author, the man in the mirror - is Annibale Carracci, a hugely talented artist acclaimed by his contemporaries as the new Raphael and who even Caravaggio believed would go far.
The founder, together with his brother Agostino and his cousin Ludovico of the late 16th century "Accademia degli Incamminati", he seems to conceive of art as a "mirror of reality", capable of freezing it, of rendering eternal as only a "true mirror" can hope to.
And this led to the creation of the paintings "The butchers (La macelleria)" and "The bean eater (Il Mangiafagioli)", paintings with an overwhelmingly realistic power that reveal an unquenchable will to overcome the parochial confines of the customary, a considerable freedom of expression and an unrestrained love for all that is real.
In 1595, Annibale entered the service of Cardinal Odoardo Farnese in Rome, and it was he who was responsible for exporting to the first city of Christendom the Carracci's reformed style of painting, which Annibale continued to develop with reference to the canonical Roman models of an idealized ancient and Renaissance art.
Annibale, on the other hand, sought to give naturalistic verisimilitude to a perfected ideal that was deducible from experience, to represent not what is but what might be and what ought to be, and, in so doing, to inspire the viewer to virtue.
Annibale Carracci: The Farnese Palace, Rome, by Charles Dempsey.
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