a new exhibition of the works of the greatest draughtsman of the Seicento opens in his birthplace of Cento
There is no entirely sincere or great art in the seventeenth century (Modern Painters vol IV)
This was the formidable scourge John Ruskin’s inimical judgment of the art of the Baroque period: insincere and second-rate.
Thankfully Ruskin’s aggressively naïve view of the Baroque has not held sway for some considerable time; however, it still took a great deal of effort on the part of subsequent generations of art critics and historians to rescue the period and its art from beneath the rubble of Ruskin’s exemplary demolition job.
One of the artists of the seventeenth-century to suffer at the hands of Ruskin was Giovanni Francesco Barbieri called Il Guercino (1591 – 1666) or ‘the squinter’, due to the unfortunate malformation of his right eye:
The grief of Guercino’s Hagar, in the Breta Gallery at Milan, is partly despicable, partly disgusting, partly ridiculous; it is not the grief of the injured Egyptian, driven forth into the desert with the destiny of a nation in her heart, but of a servant of all work turned away for stealing tea and sugar. (Ruskin Modern Painters vol. III)
Not only insincere and second-rate then, but overblown and silly t’ boot.
Guercino was born in Cento, a small porticoed town between the cities of Bologna and Ferrara in Emilia-Romagna, a town that is now internationally famous for its annual Carnevale in late February and early March; indeed, the Carnevale di Cento was the subject of one of Guercino’s earliest frescoes in 1615.
The artist achieved widespread fame during his lifetime such that he attracted the refined attention of the English king Charles I and Marie de’ Medici of France and spent time working in Rome for Popes Gregory XV and Urban VIII. After the death of Guido Reni in 1642, Guercino became the prime mover of the Bolognese school of painting until his death in 1666.
A full rescue attempt on Guercino was not made until the 1930s when the art historian and collector Sir Denis Mahon began studying the artist at the Courtauld Institute of Art under the tutelage of the great Austrian-born architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner.
For nearly three quarters of a century the ninety-four-year-old Mahon has been doing much to salvage the reputations of artists such as Caravaggio, Guido Reni, the Carracci family and, of course, his personal favourite Guercino.
Mahon has either been the instigator of or inspiration behind a succession of exhibitions on Guercino since the 1960s, many of which have been held in Guercino’s birthplace of Cento and have invariably mined Mahon’s own personal collection of paintings and drawings of the seventeenth-century Bolognese school.
The new exhibition on Guercino, curated by Massimo Pulini, which has just opened at the Pinacoteca in Cento (29 May – 31 July) and can later be seen in London at Leighton House Museum (23 September – 11 December) and at the Prado in Madrid, is yet another fruit of Mahon’s pioneering collecting and provides us with further opportunity to see Guercino’s drawings in their milieu of origin.
The sixty-three drawings in pen, pen and wash, red chalk and charcoal, taken from the Denis Mahon collection, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and public and private collections in Cento and London, are exhibited in a cool and spacious ground floor room of the Pinacoteca and are set off wonderfully against the background of the azure painted walls.
An astonishing range of genres is on display, all united all by Guercino’s gift for storytelling: religious subjects, mythological works, landscapes, portraits, nudes, caricatures and local genre scenes. Some of the most fascinating images form part of this last category: one finds visual vignettes from seventeenth-century Centese life: two women fighting in the street, a carnival party in a country tavern and a caricature of the fat Franciscan friar Benvenuto Bisi at prayer in his study.
Otherwise one is faced with an array of paunchy putti, portentous prophets and heroic herculeses. There is a particularly irresistible drawing from the Ashmolean collection of the infant Bacchus crowning one of his (seemingly unwilling) company with a ring of leaves.
The drawings are a mixture of pregnant preparatory sketches for large-scale paintings – the majority of which can be found in national museums in London, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Bologna, and of course, Cento – and little curiosities such as the ‘supernatural’ drawing from the Mahon collection entitled ‘Diavoleria’ (‘Devilment’), drawn out of sheer delight and self-indulgence rather than the necessity of work. Whatever their original purpose, however; taken as a whole the designs on display at the very least invite – indeed in many ways – compel the viewer to the conclusion that drawing is an artistic discipline unto itself, and no-one believed this more than Guercino himself.
The exhibition at Cento is thus a dual testament to the greatness of Guercino’s draughtsmanship and to the sincere dedication of Sir Denis Mahon, whose ‘rock of eye’ over decades of painstaking research and collecting has contirbuted to yet another exhibition of a group of works of unrivalled interest and quality..
It is perhaps best to leave the final word to one of Guercino’s artistic forbears and admirers, the great caricaturist, Ludovico Carracci (1555 – 1619) who wrote: ‘I’m not saying anything; even the top painters are awestruck: you will just have to see for yourself...’
Exhibition details: ‘Nel Segno di Guercino: disegni dalle collezioni Mahon, Oxford and Cento’, Cento Pinacoteca Civica 29 May – 31 July 2005, Via Giacomo Matteotti, 16
Open: Monday, Wednesday and Thursday 9.00 – 12.30 and 15.00 – 19.30
Friday, Saturday and Sunday 9.00 – 13.00 and 15.00 – 20.00
Closed: Tuesdays
Full price: € 6.00
Reductions: € 4.00
14 and under: Free
Getting there: While there are no train connections to Cento, there are regular coach services from both Bologna ( 25 km) and Ferrara (32 km) which can be taken from the coach depot round the corner from the train station and opposite the train station respectively. A return ticket costs around € 5.
