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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Martyrdom of St Peter ca. 1618-19 oil on canvas Galleria Estense, Modena |
Turner notices that the executioner painted into the bottom right corner of Guercino's Martyrdom of St Peter is a mirror-image of the executioner in the upper left corner of Caravaggio's Martyrdom of St Peter [directly below], installed seventeen years earlier in the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome. Yet the young Guercino would not make his first trip to Rome for another three years. Given Caravaggio's posthumous celebrity, Turner suggests that drawings of his composition must have penetrated to artistic circles in Emilia, where they could have reached Guercino.
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| Caravaggio Martyrdom of St Peter 1601 oil on canvas Basilica di Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome |
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| Guido Reni Martyrdom of St Peter 1604 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome |
For his own Martyrdom of St Peter of 1604, Guido Reni did have access to the Caravaggio painting. Reni's altarpiece was also installed in a Roman church (San Paolo alle Tre Fontane) – equally unavailable to Guercino in Cento as early as 1618. Yet Turner points out that the central group in the younger artist's preparatory drawing below "is much the same as in Reni's, but in reverse." By its ephemeral nature, the circulation of copy-drawings between groups of artists from one region of Italy to another is a topic more amenable to inference and speculation than evidence.
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Martyrdom of St Peter ca. 1618-19 drawing (compositional study) British Museum |
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Martyrdom of St Peter ca. 1618-19 drawing (drapery study, St Peter) Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart |
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| Jean-Honoré Fragonard after Guercino Martyrdom of St Peter ca. 1760 copy drawing Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California |
In his finished altarpiece Guercino settled on an earlier moment in St. Peter's ordeal, avoiding the tricky matter of depicting him with appropriate pathos and solemnity while upside-down.
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) St Sebastian Succoured 1619 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna |
"According to [Carlo Cesare] Malvasia, [St Sebastian Succoured] was painted in 1619 for Cardinal Serra, whose first cousin Giovanni Francesco Serra (1609-56) settled at Cassano in the Kingdom of Naples in 1631. The picture remained in Naples and descended via marriages between two branches of the Serra family and members of the Caracciolo and Carafa families, eventually hanging in the Palazzo Caracciolo-Carafa on the Riviera di Chiaia. In 1970 the Italian State purchased it on behalf of the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna, at auction from the Caracciolo-Carafa heirs, and the following year it was presented, after its restoration."
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) St Sebastian Succoured 1619 drawing (compositional study) Royal Library, Windsor |
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) St Sebastian Succoured 1619 offset drawing (compositional study) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Study of a Half-Length Female in the Guise of a Sibyl 1619 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna |
"The painting was bequeathed to the museum by Sir Denis Mahon, who had acquired it in 1952. It had previously belonged to William Douglas-Hamilton (1845-95), 12th Duke of Hamilton, who sold it in 1882, when it was bought by George Howard (1843-1911), later 9th Earl of Carlisle; it remained at Castle Howard, North Yorkshire, until its auction in 1944 from the estate of the Hon. Geoffrey W.A. Howard (1877-1935). [Giuliano] Briganti published it as a study for the figure of Irene on the left of St Sebastian Succoured, known at the time only through copies. According to Mahon, the unfinished preliminary oil study was subsequently transformed into an independent, saleable subject, a Sibyl, by replacing her sponge with a scroll and adding a book on the table over which she is bent."
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Return of the Prodigal Son 1619 oil on canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
"In these canvases, Guercino's pre-Roman style is seen at is most vigorous. Titian's colour and confident brushwork is blended with the Carracci's naturalism and softness of form. So massive are the figures in relation to the picture space that they seem to burst forwards beyond their allocated space."
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| Anton Joseph von Prenner after Guercino Return of the Prodigal Son 1733 engraving Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart |
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| Mauro Gandolfi after Guercino Return of the Prodigal Son ca. 1790 copy drawing Museo del Prado, Madrid |
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| Blasius Höfel after Guercino Return of the Prodigal Son ca. 1821-28 etching and engraving British Museum |
– quoted texts from The Paintings of Guercino: a revised and expanded catalogue raisonné by Nicholas Turner (Rome: Ugo Bozzi Editore, 2017)