Guercino

Guercino was born in the small town of Cento but getting his start in nearby Bologna he moved to Rome from 1621–23 to exploit the patronage offered by the Bolognese Pope Gregory XV. On the Pope’s death he returned to Cento and thence to Bologna where he assumed the mantle of the leading Bolognese artist Guido Reni (1575–1642) who had died in 1641. Thereafter, he enjoyed a national and international reputation, wisely refusing an invitation to settle in England.

Guercino’s early works are predictably influenced by the Carracci family, instigators of the Bolognese baroque, and particularly by Lodovico Carracci (1555–1619) in his use of rich chiaroscuro. Guercino’s early style was later referred to by a collector as his maniera gagliarda ‘vigorous manner’. One of the best-known examples is St William of Aquitaine Receiving the Cowl in the Galleria Nazionale, Bologna. Here a warm, flickering light sweeps over the figures many of which have a beguiling charm, even more evident in his juicy Erminia and the Shepherd in Birmingham, UK or the wistful Et in Arcadia Ego in the Palazzo Barberini, Rome. Guercino portrays two shepherds who gaze raptly at a skull, perhaps as a memento mori but maybe also fascinated by the idea of mortality, like the dead in Virgil’s Aeneid waiting for admittance to Hades: “they held out longing hands to the farther shore.”