A happy time for Guercino, time for exhibitions and rediscoveries

The Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna offers citizens and international culture an exhibition on Guercino (Cento, 1591 - Bologna, 1666). A review toward an anthology of works that place the master at the center of seventeenth-century European painting and, above all, fully echo a glory that never faded along the secular vicissitudes of criticism and transient interests.

A splendid genius of high culture but capable of popular language, the Cento painter with the tantalizing nickname universally personified that satisfying balance between classical metrics and expressive immediacy that was the most generous and most continuously creative outpouring of an all-Emilian strand of art between the 15th and 16th centuries. Such achievement is no secret to scholars who are well acquainted with the gaudiosa source of Emilian painting: a source gushing forth from the heart of the Renaissance that bears the name and deeds of Antonio Allegri. For from Correggio, from his vivid harmonic completeness, his tender tactility, and his cosmic spatial freedom descended a heritage that first imaged the Carraccis and their successors, then Guercino, who declared Correggio an “unparalleled master.” He unconstrainedly picked up the great lesson and added to it his felicitous compositional thinking, along with the preeminent instance of an immediately experienced naturalism and the fragrant freshness of a “country spirit” that makes his works indegradable especially with regard to the pugnacious and vivid dialectic between light, penumbra, and shadow.

.

To introduce its inhabitants and visitors to Guercino, the city of Bologna has already begun cyclical illuminations and itineraries regarding this pictorial genius who has ingeminated the city with more than fifty masterpieces (as he did in papal Rome) and is attracting the full cultural and aesthetic enjoyment of many popular and youthful streams who are willingly increasing their precise interest in the present works and in European figurative arts.

As well, Italian and general artistic attention is happily experiencing a great moment of admiring reappraisal on Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, who was a handsome gentleman of noble bearing, highly educated and limpidly Christian. He was a painter, and a congenital strabismus caused him to be called “il Guercino” as a boy, but he saw well, indeed very well. As we have already written he was born in Cento in 1591 and would end his life in Bologna, after many triumphs, in 1666. Growing up in the countryside, near the gates of his city, he imbued himself with the common sense of simple families, and the immediate and universal contact with nature. Each of his paintings, in fact, carries within it a subdued limpidity, a truth that enters with élan into the soul of the observer, accompanied in the various visions by the powerful atmospheric effect that modulates the vivid light radiated and the powerful shadows gathered in the youthful, tempered days of Cento.

This is our premise, which is well aware of the prodigious gifts bestowed on him by the sky, but also of the compositional study he tenaciously conducted: new, convincing, always effective and totally prehensile with respect to the subject, even in the proposals that most surprise us by the fullness of their full enveloping charm. We know that the coming study season will bring distinguished exhibitions on Guercino, including in Turin and Rome, almost an international embrace of the great master.

In.

.

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri’s values are truly astonishing. They struck his first supporters in his hometown, and quickly the Bolognese pictorial milieu in the person of the great Ludovico Carracci, then immediately in the evaluations of wise men and ecclesiastics, with an immediate and pervasive wave of sound fame. Cardinal Alessando Ludovisi, his client in the city of Bologna, becoming Pope Gregory XV, took him to Rome where in two years (1621-23) he won every comparison. Then, highly acclaimed, he worked for Reggio Emilia and Piacenza; he sent works to other cities and places. In 1629 he was honored personally in Cento by the intentional visit of Diego Velasquez-a sensational event. In 1642 he was invited to take his workshop to Bologna, where he worked intensively until his death.

Prominent among the values is the sketching ability, certainly free of any research hindrance, and which makes touching that virtual and immediate figurative mobility that makes the painting a lively dialogue, easy and assumable, for every episode exhibited, religious or profane. The balance of composition, always, even when the presential masses are several. The use of squillant colors, including the beloved blue that distinguishes the master. The mimicry of the characters, corresponding to the Guercino’s identifying heart, devout or lyrical, which enters into the very intimacy of the protagonists of his scenes. Certainly the Exhibition Catalogue reveals the strength of the language and the most sensitive details, which we can confirm from the breadth of its applications.

.

Here we can recall the great scholar who extolled Guercino, namely Sir Denis Mahon, a good friend of Gnudi and then of Andrea Emiliani who followed him wisely: we saw him precisely smiling at the 1968 Exhibition right here in Bologna in the same Pinacoteca. In our time the baton has properly passed to Daniele Benati and his School who have deepened the territorial, documentary, contextual, and truly scientific investigations. Following now a chronological trace of Guercini’s works, we can see in part the territorial diffusion they had and the recognition they obtained after the master’s return from Rome. Not forgetting the now famous “Book of Accounts” edited by his brother Paolo (an excellent chiseler in painting), to which document the exhibition opening this October devotes a special Section.

.

It is.

One.

.

.

.

It is.

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.