Federico Barocci was definitely one of the most highly regarded painters working in Italy
towards the end of the 16th and in the very first years of the 17th century.
Nobody's ever heard of him, and yet he is one of the world's greatest colourists and
one of the greatest draughtsmen that there have ever been in the history of Italian painting.
He was a wonderful innovator and he always has an original take on things. So they're
really beautiful and they're very intellectually interesting, as well.
Federico Barocci was born around 1533 in Urbino, a north-eastern city not far from Venice.
Urbino had been a major court centre under the Montefeltro family. It really flourished
and became a real centre for erudition, for mathematics, for major artists that came to
that court. So by the time he was in his twenties, he had had exposure to a number of artists
in the tradition of Raphael and the tradition of Titian.
Federico Barocci certainly had an affection for the Duke Francesco Maria della Rovere.
The Duke was a very pious and intellectual man. He amassed a vast library in his later
life and also wrote deeply.
He went to Rome in the 50s and he went again in the 1560s. But, according to his biographer,
he was poisoned. There are various interpretations as to whether he was actually poisoned. I
personally think he probably was.
He retreated, and so from the mid-1560s till the end of his life, 1612, he lived and worked
in Urbino.
Barocci and his family lived in the heart of Urbino. Visible from the top windows of
his own house, Barocci could see the Palazzo Ducale.
He often included that view in the background of his pictures.
When Barocci returned from Rome, he made his first real altarpiece, his 'Martyrdom of Saint
Sebastian'. The palette is dazzling. It is a dynamic altarpiece. It certainly involves
you as you go in and you see the archers there and their dynamic poses and to me that's
one of the great things that Barocci does. There is such inherent dynamism in so many
of his figures that it really does point toward that explosive drama of the 17th century that
we call Baroque.
He's a painter who's very, very interested in making things real. His concern is to make
things more graceful without departing from real anatomy, the structure of the human body
and a plausible pictorial space. And he does this both by the flutter of drapery, the compositional
lines, and he does it by colour. Colour, I think, is largely something which he invents
and he thinks of in, if you like, musical terms.
As we go on in his career, Barocci experiments more and more with the use of illumination.
He does it in his 'Stigmatization of Saint Francis', where he hones in on the idea of
the flooding of light, almost palpable light, that washes over the figure of Saint Francis,
and you can almost feel it.
With his altarpieces, he really did want people to be transported out of themselves. He would
have been very pleased by the idea of people actually forgetting themselves completely,
as they did with certain types of divine music, in front of his pictures. The idea of transport,
of you being enraptured, that is absolutely what Barocci is about.