The academy was founded as the
Accademia dei Desiderosi ("Academy of the Desirous") and sometimes known as the
Accademia dei Carracci after its founders,
the three Carracci cousins:
Agostino,
Annibale and
Ludovico. Annibale headed the institution thanks to his strong personality. The birth of this and other academies indicated artists' desire to be seen on the same level as poets and musicians, rather than as just artisans and the Accademia degli Incamminati soon providing a meeting space for other intellectuals, such as the doctor
Melchiorre Zoppio and the astronomer
Giovanni Antonio Magini, who both frequented it. On its foundation, its members soon chose a heraldic emblem for the institution, made up of a
celestial sphere with
Ursa Minor at its centre and below it the motto
Contentione Perfectus. It was set up as a private institution of artists with the aim of providing a comprehensive training in the practice and theory both of art and of other activities then considered to be of little importance. In the Accademia artists were allowed to draw the nude from live models, which was prohibited by the
Counter Reformation Catholic church. Considered "the first major art school based on life drawing", the
Accademia was the model for later art schools throughout Europe. The style the new academy was aiming for was "an eclectic ideal", taking (in the words of a sonnet from Agostino Carracci to
Niccolò dell'Abbate) "from
Raphael a feminine grace of line, from
Michelangelo a muscular force, from
Titian strong colours and from
Correggio gentle colours.
Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo also wrote on that style in his
Idea del tempio della pittura (1591). ==Bibliography==