ANNIBALE CARRACCI. Gli affreschi della Cappella Herrera
Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica - Palazzo Barberini, Roma November 17, 2022 - February 05, 2023
This exhibition brings together for the very first time the frescoes and altarpiece – a splendid cycle in its own right but, above all, a superb and hitherto little-known work by Annibale Carracci – that once formed the decoration of the Herrera Chapel in the church of San Giacomo degli Spagnoli in Rome.
The church of San Giacomo degli Spagnoli in Piazza Navona was one of the Spanish nation’s most emblematic sites in Rome from the 15th to the 18th centuries. Castilian banker Juan Enríquez de Herrera (c. 1539 – 1610), a leading player in the international financial circles of his day, had a family chapel built in the church in 1602, entrusting its decoration to Annibale Carracci who had recently completed the frescoes in the Gallery in Palazzo Farnese with great success.
Carracci devised the decorative scheme and produced the cartoons for the frescoes, but from the outset he shared their execution with a painter in his circle named Francesco Albani. Some time between late 1604 and early 1605 Carracci was stricken by a serious illness which prevented him from carrying on the work and so Albani took charge of the project, albeit under Carracci’s watchful eye. The decoration of San Giacomo degli Spagnoli was dismantled in the early 19th century after decades of gradual neglect. The nineteen frescoes in the Herrera Chapel were removed between 1833 and 1836 and stored along with the altarpiece in Santa Maria in Monserrato, the other church in Rome associated with the Spanish royal house. Transferred onto canvas, the frescoes were shipped to Spain in 1850 and split between Barcelona and Madrid. Today, nine of them are in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya and seven in the Museo del Prado. The altarpiece remained in Santa Maria in Monserrato, while the whereabouts of three of the frescoes is uknown.
Recent restoration and cooperation between the Museo Nacional del Prado, the Museu Nacional d’Art de Cataluny and the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica have now brought these outstanding paintings back into the limelight. The frescoes have been studied, understood and reassessed for the first time, after their dispersal and fragile condition – especially that of the paintings in Madrid – had condemned them to almost two centuries of oblivion. The surviving frescoes and the altarpiece have been brought together for the first time since 1833 in three exhibitions in Madrid, Barcelona and Rome respectively. The layout in Palazzo Barberini, however, is very different from that of the previous two exhibitions in that we have reconstructed the volume of the Herrera Chapel to enable visitors to grasp in its entirety this decorative scheme conceived by Annibale Carracci and executed by his closest associates.