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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Martyrdom of St Laurence ca. 1627-28 oil on canvas Duomo di Ferrara |
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Martyrdom of St Laurence (detail) ca. 1627-28 oil on canvas Duomo di Ferrara |
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Martyrdom of St Laurence ca. 1627-28 drawing (compositional study) Musée du Louvre |
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Martyrdom of St Laurence ca. 1627-28 drawing (compositional study) Teylers Museum, Haarlem |
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Martyrdom of St Laurence ca. 1627-28 drawing (figure study) Ashmolean Museum, Oxford |
"Though [Carlo Cesare] Malvasia recorded the altarpiece, now in Ferrara Cathedral, as painted in 1629 for Cardinal Lorenzo Magalotti (1584-1637), no payment record for it appears in the Libro dei Conti, begun in January of that year. It is now generally thought to have been started perhaps as early as the summer of 1627. . . . If widely assumed to have been finished and paid for in 1628, the original destination of Guercino's Ferrara altarpiece of the patron's name saint remains unclear. . . . [It entered] the Cathedral itself only in 1641, several years after the Cardinal's death."
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| Guercino (or anonymous copyist) Penitent Magdalene ca. 1627-28 oil on canvas (monochrome photograph by James Anderson) Museo di Capodimonte, Naples |
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| workshop copy after Guercino Penitent Magdalene ca. 1627-28 oil on canvas John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida |
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| Guglielmo Morghen after Guercino Penitent Magdalene ca. 1750 engraving Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart |
"The date of the Farnese's acquisition of the [Penitent Magdalene], long prized for its sympathetic representation of human expression, is unknown: by 1680 it was in their possession – as by Guercino. . . . The tide of opinion began to turn by the early 20th century, and it was ultimately dismissed as a copy of a lost original. . . . The traditional attribution to Guercino, as well as the high regard in which it was long held, cannot be lightly ignored."
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Semiramis receiving News of the Revolt of Babylon ca. 1627-28 oil on canvas (monochrome photograph of painting destroyed in World War II) Gemäldegalerie, Dresden |
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| anonymous printmaker after Guercino Semiramis receiving News of the Revolt of Babylon 1838 lithograph (painting destroyed in World War II) private collection |
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| Carl Friedrich Seifert after Guercino Semiramis receiving News of the Revolt of Babylon 1855 engraving (painting destroyed in World War II) Gemäldegalerie, Dresden |
"Unlike Guercino's first treatment of this subject, now in Boston, completed in 1624, this picture [Semiramis receiving News of the Revolt of Babylon, now destroyed] was not mentioned by Malvasia. In this version, Semiramis exemplifies a type of female beauty that Guercino had perfected in the Sibyls painted in 1627 during the second phase of the cupola decoration of Piacenza Cathedral."
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Mars ca. 1628 oil on canvas National Trust, Tatton Park, Cheshire |
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Mars ca. 1628 drawing (compositional study) Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest |
"The Tatton Mars – possibly to be identified as Argantes – is not mentioned in the Libro dei Conti, but may have been painted for Cardinal Bernardino Spada, who was Legate of Bologna from 1627 to 1631 and who in 1628-29 ordered three paintings from Guercino, including a Mars."
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Christ Carrying the Cross ca. 1628 drawing (compositional study) Ashmolean Museum, Oxford |
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Christ Carrying the Cross ca. 1628 drawing (compositional study) Ashmolean Museum, Oxford |
"The composition [of Christ Carrying the Cross] is well documented in an impressive sequence of preparatory studies. . . . The earliest seems to be one of two drawings in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford [both above], in which the composition is full length, including three, possibly four figures. Successive studies illustrate how the format was reduced to a half-length composition, with only two protagonists." [The painting was restored in 2016 for the Monasterio del Escorial in Spain, where it remains, but no publicly available image was located.]
– quoted texts from The Paintings of Guercino: a revised and expanded catalogue raisonné by Nicholas Turner (Rome: Ugo Bozzi Editore, 2017)