Thursday, May 20, 2021

Guercino in Bologna - 1644 (I)

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Lucretia
1644
oil on canvas
UniCredit, Bologna

"This is a fragment from the middle of a canvas likely to have been Guercino's full-sized trial version of Lucretia, ordered by Antonio Borrani of Milan.  A later owner, apparently disconcerted by a large picture of a young woman about to commit suicide, preserved the section with Lucretia's head and shoulders and presumably discarded the rest."  

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Lucretia
1644
drawing (hand study)
Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
St Philip Neri
1644
oil on canvas
(in ruinous condition)
Chiesa Nuova, Rome

Arnold van Westerhout after Guercino
St Philip Neri
1703
engraving
Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
St Paul
1644
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

"[Carlo Cesare] Malvasia recorded this head-and-shoulders of St Paul under 1644 as commissioned by 'Comendatore Luigi Manzini Bolognese'.  Luigi Manzini (1604-57), a scholar and acquaintance of Guercino, was the younger brother of Giovanni Battista Manzini (1599-1664), the actual patron (and the only brother to bear the title of Commendatore), who paid 40 scudi for the picture on 12 March 1644.  Commendatore Manzini's pictures, including the St Paul, were offered to Francesco I d'Este, Duke of Modena, in 1647, and again in 1651.  On the second occasion the Duke seems to have bought them en bloc.  The St Paul was one of a large group of pictures taken by the French from the Palazzo Ducale in 1796 and subsequently exhibited in Paris.  Like many others taken from Italy, they were never returned, despite the restitution treaty of 1815."  

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
St Helen discovering the True Cross
1644
oil on canvas
Chiesa di San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti, Venice

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
St Helen discovering the True Cross
1644
drawing (figure study)
Fondation Custodia, Paris

"A payment of 500 ducats (625 scudi) from 'li S.S. Tasca di Venezia' for this altarpiece is recorded in the account book on 5 March 1644.  . . .  The Tasca were a distinguished family of merchants, originally from Bergamo, based mainly in the S. Marco area of Venice.  . . .   Unfortunately, over the centuries the canvas has suffered considerably from damp, and the damage has been compounded by inexpert retouching."

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Cephalus and Procris
(lost painting)
1644
oil on canvas
formerly Gemäldegalerie, Dresden

"The picture, destroyed during the Second World War, was commissioned in 1644, according to Malvasia, by Marchese Cornelio Bentivoglio, 'per mandare a donare alla . . . Regina di Francia'.  . . .  Soon after taking delivery of the picture, Anne of Austria, Queen Consort of France, gave it to her minister, Cardinal Mazarin, in whose inventories of 1653 and 1661 it appears.  . . .  The picture's subject is Cephalus's grief after mistakenly killing his wife, Procris.  . . .  In his agony, Cephalus crosses his legs and wrings his hands together in much the same attitude, but in reverse, as does Christ in the Mocking of Christ [directly below], the frontispiece to Dürer's Large Passion woodcut series.  As for the dead Procris, with her body propped up against a stony ledge, there is more than a distinct resemblance to the nymph asleep . . . at the lower right of Titian's Bacchanal of the Andrians [also below] of c. 1519-20 in the Prado, Madrid." 

Albrecht Dürer
Mocking of Christ
1511
woodcut
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Titian
Bacchanal of the Andrians
ca. 1519-20
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Cephalus and Procris
1644
drawing (compositional study)
Princeton University Art Museum

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Cephalus and Procris
1644
drawing (compositional study)
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Cephalus and Procris
1644
drawing (compositional study)
Royal Library, Windsor

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Cephalus and Procris
1644
drawing (compositional study)
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Louis-Simon Lempereur after Guercino
Cephalus and Procris
ca. 1750
engraving
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden

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