(Cento 1591–1666 Bologna)
Madonna and Child,
oil on canvas, 63 x 52 cm, framed

Provenance:
European private collection

We are extremely grateful to Nicholas Turner for confirming the attribution after examining the painting in the original.

This previously unpublished painting is an important addition to the early work of Guercino. It is a sketch for his Madonna and Child, in the collection of Barbara and Eduard Beaucamp, Frankurt am Main, datable c. 1621-22 (D. Stone, Guercino. Catalogo completo, Florence, 1991, p. 98, no. 77). Although the figures are painted to roughly the same scale, there are innumerable differences between the two canvases, for example in the chiaroscuro, in the range of colour and in the extent and disposition of the drapery, most conspicuously in the two treatments of the Madonna’s turban. But by far the most important difference is in the execution, the one robustly handled in Guercino’s characteristic early style and the other smoothly and beautifully finished, as if a painting on enamel.

Like many other painters of the Renaissance and the Baroque in Italy, including Titian, Guercino made replicas of his more successful paintings, a practice that seems to have increased in his mature and late periods. Good progress in understanding this fascinating and sometimes difficult activity has been made in recent years. These two different versions of the same composition—the present picture and the one in Frankfurt—are unusual because the one is self-evidently a sketch for the other. Although anachronistic, it is nevertheless illuminating to see Guercino’s two canvases in the context of the work of the great nineteenth-century British painter John Constable, whose exhibition pictures for the Royal Academy’s annual shows were prepared by a full-sized oil-sketch: two different types of painting that some two hundred years later reveal a similar gulf in execution between the broad handling of the one and the more disciplined touch of the finished work.

One of the problems arising from Guercino’s success was satisfying the desire of an eager patron who wished to commission a replica of a canvas that he had already supplied to another client. Guercino made replicas of his own work, from c. 1615 onwards. His two variants of St Jerome Sealing a Letter, both painted in c. 1617-18, are two such early examples, one in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome, and the other in a private collection, Rome (Guercino, 1591-1666, Capolavori da Cento e da Roma, exh. cat. by R. Vodret and F. Gozzi, Rome, December, 2011, to April, 2012, pp. 90-95, nos. 13-14). 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 colours in his small-sized pictures. In the present composition, the sense of peaceful harmony between mother and child, so typical of Guercino’s devotional paintings from around 1615, reflects the influence of Ludovico Carracci, Scarsellino and Bononi. Such intimacy occurs less frequently in the grander, more monumental figures in his paintings made at the beginning of his Roman stay (1621-23).

It is not out of the question, therefore, that Guercino’s newly-discovered, first version of the Madonna and Child may date from as early as c. 1615. The powerful brushwork and “non finito” aspect find a parallel with his broadly executed Madonna Feeding Pap to the Infant Christ, on copper, in the Royal Collection, Stockholm, datable c. 1615 (L. Salerno, I dipinti del Guercino, Rome, 1988, p. 92, no. 10; and Stone, p. 27, no. 9). The roughness of texture in both works, especially in the highlights, shows that Guercino had not the slightest intention of adding further glazes, since his earlier brushwork would have shown through them disfiguringly. Both pictures—the present one and that in Stockholm—came into existence as sketches and, fortunately, this is how they have remained. As sketches, they are precious survivors in the painter’s oeuvre, where they are rarities. As Guercino’s biographer Conte Carlo Cesare Malvasia remarked, the master, apparently as a matter of principle, never left a painting unfinished.

The more fully painted Frankfurt picture enlarges and clarifies the ideas first adumbrated in the newly-discovered canvas. The paint is more smoothly handled and some areas, such as the flesh, were painted with several glazes. Throughout the canvas the details are given significantly more definition and are carefully picked out with the point of the brush. With this more highly wrought application, the skin of the figures seems smoother and shinier than here, and the Madonna’s drapery is far more amply described, most notably in her turban, which is not only bigger but also more elaborate. The greater range of colours, which are also significantly more saturated—oranges, ochres and deep blue-greens—certainly reflect Guercino’s work of around 1620. This was the period when the painter’s approach to colour had moved away from the lighter tints favoured by Ferrarese painters, such as Scarsellino, whose work was so strong an influence on the early Guercino, towards more potent Venetian harmonies inspired by Titian, in which a limited range of strong colours were placed within a sombre setting. Guercino had reached maturity as a colourist only shortly before in his magnificent series of large gallery pictures made for Cardinal Serra, some of which precede the Frankfurt Madonna and Child by perhaps as little as a year or two.

It is possible, of course, that the new picture and the one in Frankfurt may have been executed one after the other. Only a technical examination of the pigments and the canvas support will provide a conclusive answer to this. But on the grounds of style I would not rule out that present canvas may have been made some years earlier when the young Guercino, bursting with creative energy, was building up his reputation in Cento. A certain similarity to the Stockholm picture just mentioned would seem to support this view. On the other hand, the style of the Frankfurt picture so clearly demonstrates that it may be dated from the beginning of the painter’s short but spectacularly productive Roman period. Perhaps some high-ranking member of the papal court, impatient to have an example of Guercino’s work for his private devotion, commissioned the Frankfurt picture. Whoever the patron, he would surely not have been told of the existence of the present prototype. Always ready to save both time and money, Guercino took a short cut by recycling a pre-existing composition and, having simplified his task, was better able to concentrate on its breathtakingly beautiful, but surprisingly atypical finish.

We are grateful to Nicholas Turner for cataloguing the present painting.