Tuesday, May 4, 2021

Guercino in Cento - 1634-1635

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Christ appearing to St Teresa
1634
oil on canvas
Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Christ appearing to St Teresa
1634
drawing (compositional study)
Royal Library, Windsor

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Christ appearing to St Teresa
1634
drawing (compositional study)
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Angers

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Christ appearing to St Teresa
1634
drawing (figure study)
Pinacoteca Civica, Cento

Gilles Rousselet after Guercino
Christ appearing to St Teresa
ca. 1650
engraving
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"[Carlo Cesare] Malvasia listed the picture under the year 1634 and said that it represented Christ showing St Teresa the glory of Paradise.  The painting was commissioned by the financier and merchant Barthélemy Lumague (d. 1641) – Malvasia called him 'Gio. Lumaga' – to decorate the family chapel in the convent church of the Discalced Carmelites, Lyon.  The deposit of 100 ducats (131 ½ scudi) was paid on 5 January 1634 by Ludovico Mastri, a local banker, and the balance of 300 ducats (405 scudi) was paid by him (on behalf of Barthélemy Lumague) on 18 August of the same year.  [Stéphane] Loire suggested that Lumague had offered to act as banker for Maria de' Medici for her proposed purchase of Guido Reni's Rape of Helen, a deal that collapsed after she fled from France in 1631.  Probably through Cardinal Spada, Guercino and Lumague were put into contact with each other."

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Allegory of Faith
ca. 1634
oil on canvas
Pushkin State Museum, Moscow

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Baptism of Christ
(lost painting)
1634
drawing (compositional study)
Teylers Museum, Haarlem

"Though Malvasia did not mention a picture of this subject commissioned from Guercino under 1634, the account book records a payment of 144 scudi on 15 April 1634 from a 'Sig.ʳ Marchese Vitelli' for a half-length composition of the Baptism of Christ.  . . .  The picture is lost, but Carel van Tuyll rightly suggested that from its style the Haarlem drawing [directly above] is a preliminary idea for it."

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Christ expelling the Moneychangers from the Temple
1634
oil on canvas
Palazzo Rosso, Genoa

Turner theorizes that the Moneychangers canvas in Genoa, above, "was a spontaneously handled sketch, short on detail and materials, which was later elaborated," and that the recently discovered version in Spain, below, "was a magnificent, fully painted gallery picture realized with the finest pigments, which later suffered."  Thus the Genoa picture, which now appears superior, likely began life in a subordinate position.

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Christ expelling the Moneychangers from the Temple
1634
oil on canvas
private collection, Spain

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Beheading of St Maurelius
1634-35
oil on canvas
Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Rest on the Return from Egypt
1634-35
oil on canvas
Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago

"It is tempting to speculate that Pier Francesco Mola might have seen Guercino at work on the Rest on the Return from Egypt in the mid-1630s at his studio in Cento, as is suggested by Mola's Adoration of the Shepherds [directly below] in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.  Not only is the horizontal format of the two canvases much the same, but so, too, is the pose and relative position of St Joseph, on the compositions's left, his head resting on his hand in one of Guercino's stock poses, ultimately borrowed from Caravaggio [also below].  The figures also balance each other across space in much the same way, with the group of shepherds to the right of Mola's picture echoing that of Guercino's musical angels."

Pier Francesco Mola
Adoration of the Shepherds
ca. 1640-43
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Caravaggio
Christ on the Mount of Olives
(formerly Giustiniani Collection, destroyed in World War II)
ca. 1605
oil on canvas
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
St Joseph and the Christ Child taking a Lily from a Vase
(lost painting)
ca. 1635
drawing (compositional study)
Princeton University Art Museum

Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
St Joseph and the Christ Child taking a Lily from a Vase
(lost painting)
ca. 1635
drawing (compositional study)
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

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