Drawings From The Age Of The Carracci

When the Renaissance finally loosened its collar and started gesturing wildly, the Carracci were there with sketchbooks.

Drawings from the Age of the Carracci (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2002) by Per Bjurström is the exhibition catalogue for that glorious moment when late sixteenth–early seventeenth-century Italian artists decided that anatomy, emotion and drapery all needed to be just a bit more dramatic. Think of it as a backstage pass to the Baroque before the paint dried.

This isn’t “finished masterpieces, politely framed.” This is:

• Red chalk figures twisting themselves into heroic knots.

• Silverpoint studies where every line mutters, “I am taking this torso very seriously.”

• Pen and wash sketches that look suspiciously like “I swear the commissioner will love this, trust me.”

• Sheet after sheet of angels, apostles, peasants, martyrs, and the odd fat putto, all warming up for their big fresco moment.

Bjurström guides you through the studios and circles around the Carracci – Annibale, Agostino, Ludovico and friends – explaining who’s drawing what, why, and how this furious scribbling changed European art. You get catalogue entries, sensible scholarship and that satisfying feeling of looking at the creative process rather than just the final, solemn altarpiece.

Published by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, it’s everything a good exhibition book should be:
portable, lavishly illustrated, and guaranteed to make you judge your own doodles more harshly than is strictly necessary.

This copy comes to you from Crappy Old Books, yet is somehow in Condition: As New, which in our slightly bewildered grading scheme means:

• The cover is crisp, glossy and unscuffed – more “just left the museum shop” than “languished on a shelf.”

• The spine is perfectly square and uncreased, as if no one has ever dared to open it wider than 30 degrees.

• The pages are bright, clean and pristine: no thumbprints, no pencilled notes, no evidence of being balanced on a café table while someone earnestly discussed chiaroscuro.

• If it’s been read, it was done with the kind of reverence usually reserved for incunabula and very small, fragile kittens.

ISBN: 9781854441706, for the cataloguer who likes their Baroque firmly barcoded.

Recommended if:

• You’ve ever looked at a ceiling painting and thought, “Yes, but what did the practice sheets look like?”

• You enjoy the idea that entire artistic revolutions start with someone drawing a tired model over and over again in slightly different poses.

• You like books full of drawings that somehow manage to be both intensely academic and perfect “I’ll just flip through this for a minute” material.

Drawings from the Age of the Carracci: the nervous system of Baroque painting laid bare in chalk and ink – now in As New condition, ready to sit on your shelf looking as if it has just stepped out of the Ashmolean, while the rest of your art books quietly wonder where they went wrong.

Keep browsing: See more Art books Other books by Per Bjurstrom