Friday, April 9, 2021

Guercino in Rome - 1622-1623

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
St Matthew and the Angel
ca. 1622
oil on canvas
Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome

Ferdinand Joubert after Guercino
St Matthew and the Angel
1835
etching
British Museum

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Liberation of St Peter
ca. 1622
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

"Economy of effort seems to explain why some of the motifs and compositional arrangement of the St Matthew and the Angel in the Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome, painted at the same time as [the Liberation of St Peter in the Prado], seem to overlap."

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Liberation of St Peter (detail)
ca. 1622
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Liberation of St Peter
ca. 1622
drawing
(study for both the Liberation of St Peter 
and St Matthew and the Angel)
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

Manuel Alegre after Guercino
Liberation of St Peter
1793
etching and engraving
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Ramón Bayeu y Subias after Guercino
Liberation of St Peter
ca. 1785
etching
British Museum

Cayetano Palmaroli after Guercino
Liberation of St Peter
ca. 1832-37
lithograph
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Toilet of Venus
ca. 1622-23
oil on canvas (trial version)
Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Toilet of Venus
ca. 1622-23
oil on canvas (finished version)
Goethe Academy, Renaissance, California

William Wynne Ryland after Guercino
Toilet of Venus
1767
stipple-engraving
Wellcome Collection, London

"The Toilet of Venus was clearly influenced by Titian's Worship of Venus (Prado, Madrid) [directly below], which was originally in the Camerino of Alfonso d'Este at Ferrara but which by 1621 had passed into the Ludovisi collection, where Guercino could have seen it.  He was clearly enraptured by its play of putti, which also inspired those in the frescoes he was painting in the Casino Ludovisi and those in his ceiling painting of St. Chrysogonus in Glory."

Titian
Worship of Venus
1518-19
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Memento Mori
ca. 1622-23
oil on canvas
private collection

"On the right [of the Memento Mori] a putto polishes the top of a skull while holding a convex mirror up in one hand – a motif that is similar to the two convex mirrors raised by Archimedes in a drawing [directly below] in the British Museum, London, in order to defend Syracuse from attack by burning the ships of the Roman fleet.  Here, the shiny top of the skull provides the other reflective surface to deflect the rays of the sun."

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Archimedes deflecting the Rays of the Sun
ca. 1622-23
drawing
British Museum

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
The Sudarium
ca. 1623
oil on canvas
private collection

– quoted texts from The Paintings of Guercino: a revised and expanded catalogue raisonné by Nicholas Turner (Rome: Ugo Bozzi Editore, 2017)