Details

Name

Federico Barocci

Brief Biography

about 1535–1612, Italian

Occupation

Painter

Description

One of the most original, accomplished and influential Italian painters of the later 1500s, Barocci spent virtually his entire career in his native Urbino. After his training there under the Venetian expatriate Battista Franco, Barocci made two early visits to Rome, but after 1563 he was able to work for sometimes quite distant patrons without leaving his home base. Around this time he abandoned the blend of central Italian and Venetian Mannerism of his early years for a mature style that owed much to the pictorial delicacy and religious emotionalism of Correggio (qv). Despite his position as court painter to Duke Francesco Maria II of Urbino, Barocci was active almost exclusively as a painter of religious pictures, and in particular of altarpieces, for destinations such as Perugia, Arezzo and Rome, as well as for Urbino and Pesaro. In preparation for these he made an exceptional number of drawings, usually executed in coloured chalks, and characterised by a soft, Correggesque sfumato.