Thursday, November 3, 2016

Guercino Promoted by Stendhal

Guercino
Apparition of Christ to his Mother
1628-30
oil on canvas
Pinacoteca Civica, Cento

Stendhal wrote a cultivated and idiosyncratic guide to Rome and neighboring territories in the late 1820s. Among the paintings seen and described, he particularly admired a canvas by Guercino of the late 1620s, The Apparition of Christ to his Mother (above). "Without in any way comparing the artistic range, but merely considering the representation of nature, I think we find many affinities between Shakespeare and Guercino."

This preference revealed somewhat old-fashioned taste in the middle-aged Stendhal. Advanced opinion had already determined to reject Baroque painting wholesale. "There is no entirely sincere or great art in the seventeenth century," as John Ruskin would write a few years later.

The work below all dates from the earliest phase of Guercino's career in the provinces, before the momentous Roman adventures of 1621-23. Sybille Ebert-Schifferer asserts that in this early work can be read Guercino's special intention to "translate freely a textual source into a mood established by purely painterly means ... to break through the picture's surface plane, and thus its ontological boundedness, by using direct gestures extending beyond the frame or by bringing the picture close to the viewer."

Guercino
Dead Christ mourned by two Angels
ca. 1617-18
oil on copper
National Gallery, London

Guercino
God the Father with Angel
1620
oil on canvas
Musei di Strada Nuova, Genoa

Guercino
St Charles Borromeo at Prayer
1613-14
canvas
Collegiate Church of San Biagio, Cento

Guercino
Et in Arcadia ego 
ca. 1618
oil on canvas
Palazzo Barberini, Rome

The identical shepherd-pair appears in close-up immediately above, and in the background immediately below.

Guercino
Apollo Flaying Marsyas
ca. 1618
oil on canvas
Palazzo Pitti, Florence

Guercino
Christ and the Samaritan Woman
1619-20
oil on canvas
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth

Guercino
William of Aquitaine receives the monastic habit from St Gregory
1620
oil on canvas
Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna

In the catalog to the 1992 Guercino retreospective, Andrea Emiliani transcribed an old story about the painting immediately above. Giovanni Battista Passeri claimed that around the year 1660  ". . . he paid a visit to the Church of San Gregorio in Bologna, along with some of his students, in the company of Guercino, by now an old man. When the students expressed their admiration for Saint William Receives the Monastic Habit, the large altarpiece that Guercino had painted in 1620, the artist's reaction to their compliment was to burst out: "but that was when the pot was really boiling!"

Guercino
Raising of Lazarus
ca. 1619
oil on canvas
Louvre

Guercino
Erminia and the Shepherd
1619-20
oil on canvas
Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery

Guercino
Erminia finds the wounded Tancred
1619
oil on canvas
Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome


Guercino
Return of the Prodigal Son
1619
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum. Vienna

Guercino
Susanna and the Elders
1617
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Guercino
Landscape by moonlight
1616
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Guercino
Landscape with Concert
1617
oil on copper
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Sybille Ebert-Schifferer's essay on the artist appears in the same 1992 catalog from Washington DC  Guercino : Master Painter of the Baroque edited by Sir Denis Mahon, issued to mark the 400th anniversary of the artist's birth. Ebert-Shifferer's is, as always, the strongest contribution, and she it is who crucially points out that as a provincial and as a plebian, Guercino was one of those rare 17th-century Italian painters whose figurative style "appears to have emerged without reference to classical sculpture."