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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Landscape with Water Games 1621 fresco Sala del Caminetto, Casino Ludovisi, Rome |
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Landscape with Water Games 1621 preparatory drawing (of the artist's numerous surviving landscape drawings, this is the only one modeling a completed painting) private collection |
"Following the death of the Borghese Pope Paul V (reg. 1605-1621) on 28 January 1621, Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi, Archbishop of Bologna, was elected pope as Gregory XV; he was 67 years old. As Archbishop of Bologna (1612-21), he had greatly admired Guercino's work and was one of his most politically powerful patrons. On his elevation to the papacy, Ludovisi summoned the then 30-year-old artist to Rome to paint the fresco decoration of the ceiling of the Loggia dell Benedizioni. This vast, hall-like space, located on the first floor of the façade of St. Peter's, had been completed in 1612. . . . The fee Guercino was promised was the immense sum of 22,000 scudi, but, in the event, he never even started work. . . . The day after his coronation, Gregory XV appointed his 25-year-old nephew Ludovico Ludovisi (1595-1632) as cardinal. Intelligent, politically effective and a strong proponent of his family's interests, the cardinale nipote seems to have had quite different ideas as to how Guercino's precious time in Rome should be spent, and he put them into immediate effect. At the young cardinal's initiative, the ambitious Benediction Loggia commission was jettisoned. From his point of view, there were good practical reasons against the painter starting such an enormous official project at the beginning of the new pope's reign. The Cardinal predicted, rightly it turns out, that access to unlimited papal funds through his ailing uncle might be short-lived, hence his substitution of smaller private commissions for the Ludovisi inner circle. . . . Cardinal Ludovisi wasted no time in advancing the family's interests, and on 3 June he purchased from Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte (1549-1627) the former Casino del Nero in the rural area near Porta Pinciana, as well as adjacent land and properties. Decoration of the renamed Casino Ludovisi was underway by 29 July 1621."
"Given their resemblance to the scenes of daily life in the landscape frescoes at the Casa Pannini, Cento, I support [Carlo Cesare] Malvasia's inference that Guercino's engagement at the villa began with his contribution to the decoration of [the small Sala del Caminetto (above) in which Guercino frescoed only one of the four panels, the other three shared out among Domenichino, Paul Bril, And Giovanni Battista Viola]."
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Allegory of Fame, with Honour and Virtue 1621 ceiling fresco Sala della Fama, Casino Ludovisi, Rome |
"Within weeks of Guercino's arrival in Rome in 1621, he and the quadratura painter Agostino Tassi (1595-1632) began work, very likely on the fresco of Fame, which occupied them for the summer and autumn of that year. . . . Thanks to Guercino's use of tempera on a dry plaster surface – as opposed to buon fresco – he could undertake the sorts of changes he was accustomed to making in his oil paintings, but the penalty was a sometimes grubby-looking finish in the corrected passages. . . . The creature at which Fame points her trumpet is neither a dove nor an eagle, but a phoenix, the symbol of eternity and rebirth."
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Allegory of Fame, with Honour and Virtue (detail, figure of Fame) 1621 ceiling fresco Sala della Fama, Casino Ludovisi, Rome |
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Allegory of Fame, with Honour and Virtue (detail, figures of Honour and Virtue) 1621 ceiling fresco Sala della Fama, Casino Ludovisi, Rome |
"The figures at the foot of Fame are Honour and [Military] Virtue, one in a yellow dress, and the other in red, reiterating the colours of the [Ludovisi] heraldic motif."
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Aurora in her Chariot, with Putti among Treetops 1621 ceiling fresco Sala dell'Aurora, Casino Ludovisi, Rome |
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Aurora in her Chariot, with Putti among Treetops 1621 ceiling fresco Sala dell'Aurora, Casino Ludovisi, Rome |
"In the fresco of Aurora, a feigned roofless structure gives the illusion of open space above, where the goddess of Dawn speeds across the sky in her . . . chariot. The ceiling is only 5 meters high, so upon entering the room, the spectator has the sense of being in the midst of a dizzying performance."
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Aurora in her Chariot, with Putti among Treetops (detail of putti) 1621 ceiling fresco Sala dell'Aurora, Casino Ludovisi, Rome |
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Aurora in her Chariot, with Putti among Treetops (landscape detail) 1621 ceiling fresco Sala dell'Aurora, Casino Ludovisi, Rome |
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| Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) Aurora in her Chariot (Sala dell'Aurora, Casino Ludovisi, Rome) 1621 preparatory drawing Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin |
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| Giovanni Porretti after Guercino Aurora in her Chariot, with Tithonus behind (Sala dell'Aurora, Casino Ludovisi, Rome) 1780 engraving Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart |
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| Giovanni Battista Pasqualini after Guercino Aurora in her Chariot, with Tithonus behind (Sala dell'Aurora, Casino Ludovisi, Rome) 1621 engraving Harvard Art Museums |
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| Carlo Lasinio after Guercino Aurora in her Chariot (Sala dell'Aurora, Casino Ludovisi, Rome) 1796 hand-colored etching (unmounted fan-leaf) British Museum |
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| Giovanni Battista Pasqualini after Guercino Aurora in her Chariot (Sala dell'Aurora, Casino Ludovisi, Rome) 1621 engraving Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Giovanni Battista Pasqualini after Guercino Tithonus, behind the Chariot of Aurora (Sala dell'Aurora, Casino Ludovisi, Rome) 1621 engraving Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
"Compared with the honours accorded to such successful fresco painters of the day as Arpino, Domenichino, Lanfranco and Pietro da Cortona, the impact of Guercino's Roman frescoes in the immediate term, given their location, was probably slight."
– quoted texts from The Paintings of Guercino: a revised and expanded catalogue raisonné by Nicholas Turner (Rome: Ugo Bozzi Editore, 2017)