Giovanni Francesco Barbieri

known as Guercino (1591 Cento – 1666 Bologna)
MADONNA AND CHILD
 
c. 1621
Oil on Canvas, height: 63 cm, width: 52,5 cm
     
PROVENANCE
European private property
      
LITERATURE
Nicholas Turner, The Paintings of Guercino. A Revisedand Expanded Catalogue raisonné, Rom 2017, S. 217–221, 366
      
The painting Madonna and Child is one of Guercino’s early works and has been included in Nicholas Turner’s new catalogue raisonné published in 2017.
 
According to Nicholas Turner’s expertise, it is a sketch for the painting of the same name of about 1621 from the collection of Barbara and Eduard Beaucamp that today is to be found in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main as a donation from the collectors.
 
Although the figures are painted to roughly the same scale, there are numerous differences between the two canvases, for example in the chiaroscuro, in the range of color, and in the extent and representation of the drapery, most conspicuously in the treatment of the Madonna’s turban. By far the most important difference, however, lies in the execution, the one powerful in Guercino’s characteristic early style, the other aimed at a finished painting.
 
In both versions of the Madonna and Child the two heads are much the same in structure and physical type. This was the time when the chiaroscuro contrasts in Guercino’s work were at their strongest, with his palette sometimes confined to two or three colors in his small-sized pictures. In the present composition, the sense of peaceful harmony between mother and child becomes particularly manifest.
 
The painting is cleaned and framed.
 

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, genannt Guercino
 
Giovanni Francesco Barbieri was born in Cento, Italy on February 1591 and died in Bologna on December 22, 1666. He is considered one of the foremost Baroque painters. According to his biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia, his nickname (the squinter) derives from the fact that he had a squint in his right eye following a childhood accident—a story that is not documented beyond all doubt, though. When he was seventeen, he was apprenticed to Benedetto Gennari (1563–1658), a painter of the Bolognese School. He was essentially self-taught, however. By 1615, he moved to Bologna, where his work was applauded by Lodovico Carracci (1555–1619). In 1621, Pope Gregory XV invited him to come to Rome where he stayed until the latter’s death two years after. Guercino was an artist already highly acclaimed during his lifetime. He was extremely productive and taught until his death in 1666.
 
His early style was influenced by the Carracci family and, above all, by their drawing school, the Accademia dei Desiderosi. Taking it as a model, Guercino founded his own academy in his native Cento in 1616, the Accadamia del Nudo. The numerous reforms of the Carraccis’ academy—the study of the human body after live nude models, the interest in natural light and its refraction on the human skin, and the general turn to a naturalist approach—were to inform Guercino’s production lastingly. His late work, which has more light and clarity, approached that of his contemporary Guido Reni (1575–1642). Guercino painted two large-size canvases in the style of Caravaggio (1571–1610), though he had probably never laid eyes on an original by the painter. It is the strong chiaroscuro contrasts so typical of both Caravaggio and Guercino which are always pointed out in discussions on the parallels between the two artists’ achievements. All in all, Guercino created more than a hundred altarpieces, about one hundred an d fifty paintings, as well as frescoes in the Villa Ludovisi and in San Crisogono in Rome and in the Piacenza Cathedral.