Charity, oil on canvas, 138.5 x 172.5 cm, framed

We are grateful to Nicholas Turner for confirming the attribution of the present painting after examining the original.

This newly-discovered painting is very likely the “Carita con li 3 Putti,” for which Guercino received 150 scudi from Padre D. Gregorio Maffoni on 26 September, 1644.(1) According to the painter’s systematic pricing of his work, based on the size of the different figures in a given composition, the sum of 150 scudi corresponds roughly to those represented here: one adult half-length, two putti and the head and shoulders of an infant (these last three elements would have been priced about the same as three adult heads).(2) Padre Maffoni may have received a discount because he was a priest. In his life of Guercino, Conte Carlo Cesare Malvasia cites the Charity among the painter’s commissions for 1644: “Una Carità con tre putti al P. Maffoni”.(3)

The style of the picture corresponds well with Guercino’s work of the mid-1640s. In 1642, the painter left his native Cento for Bologna, where he took on the role as the city’s leading painter, a position vacated by the death in that same year of his arch-rival Guido Reni (1573–1642). This enhanced professional status accentuated a tendency already apparent in his work from some years before, in the direction of more strongly classical compositions and brighter, more widely ranging colours. This more elevated style continued to develop as his work matured still further. This purer, more spiritual approach also coincided with a change in taste of his clients, who were keen both to own canvases from the hand of the by now famous painter and to follow the growing international taste for works in a classical style.

Radiographs of Charity reveal that Guercino continued to make slight adjustments to some details after he had begun painting the canvas. Of these pentiments, the most significant occur in the lower left corner, where the line of the shadow cast by the coverlet resting on top of the mattress continues through Charity’s right thigh, indicating that her knees had earlier been directed more to the right. A retouched red chalk offset of Charity taken from a compositional drawing by Guercino now lost – one of a large group of offsets from red chalk drawings by Guercino, in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle – shows that at one stage her knees were swung round to the left, over the corner of the bed (her legs are seen at the right in the offset, since Guercino’s original design was reversed in the process of transfer) (fig. 1).(4) Throughout his career, it was an entirely characteristic trait of Guercino’s working method to keep his options open until the very last minute.

Another interesting pentiment, less easy to see in the radiograph, is for the left leg of the putto standing to the left and holding up a cushion with both hands. In the finished painting, this left leg is in shadow and almost vertical, while his right catches the light as it moves forwards to touch his foot against the bottom corner of the cushion. The radiograph shows that his lower left leg was originally bent back, not unlike the lower left leg of his counterpart to the right of the composition, which is similarly in shadow cast in shadow. Perhaps Guercino made the change to avoid an awkward repetition of these two opposite, backward moving left legs.

The turban worn by Charity is close in type to the headgear of Cleopatra in Cleopatra Kneeling before Augustus, in the Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome, painted in 1640, where she, too, is attired in a red décolleté dress.(5) The white linen-covered mattress of the bed, the purple awnings in the upper corners hitched back to either side, and the prominent cushion with tassels at the corners bring to mind the even more lavish setting of the The Death of Cleopatra, in the Galleria d’arte del Comune, the Palazzo Rosso, Genoa, painted in 1648.(6) Finally, Charity’s side-long look at the putto on the right recalls the gaze, this time towards the spectator, of the putto accompanying the Phrygian Sibyl, in a private collection, painted in 1647.(7) 

A compositional study for the Charity is in the Burrell Collection, Glasgow Museums, and was recently published by Robert Wenley. It is evidently an early idea for Maffoni’s picture, which had not yet come to light at the time of his writing (fig. 2).(8) The style of the drawing suggests a date in the mid-1640s and the handling bears a remarkable similarity to that of some of Guercino’s studies for the altarpiece of the Finding of the True Cross, painted in 1644 for the church of S. Lazzaro dei Mendicanti in Venice.(9) The many differences between the Glasgow drawing and the painting include the position of the head of Charity, which in the drawing is seen in profile to the right, rather than full-face, and the head of the suckling infant appears on the right in the drawing, instead of on the left. The lost red chalk drawing already referred to, whose appearance is recorded in an offset at Windsor, belongs to a much later stage in the evolution of the composition.

Wenley rightly connected the Glasgow drawing with the composition of the present picture, previously known only from a weak repetition in a private collection, where it is given to Guercino’s younger nephew, Cesare Gennari (1637–1688).(10) The reappearance of the present picture makes it likelier that the private collection picture is simply a replica by a member of Guercino’s school, probably made in the artist’s studio, before the original had been delivered to Maffoni. Cesare Gennari could hardly have been its author, since, in 1644, he would have been just seven years old.

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

Notes:
1). B. Ghelfi, Il libro dei conti del Guercino, 1629–1666, Nuova Alfa, 1997, p. 122, no. 316, as unidentified.
2). Heads were rated at 25 ducats each (33.75 scudi), half-lengths at 50 ducats (67.5 scudi), and whole-lengths at 100 ducats (135 scudi).
3). C. C. Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice, ed. 1841, II, p. 266.
4). Windsor Castle, Royal Library: inv. no. 2966; retouched offset in red chalk; 197 x 269 mm (D. Mahon and N. Turner, The drawings of Guercino in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, Cambridge, 1989, p. 200, no. 712. An early study in the Teyler Museum, Haarlem, for Guercino’s Death of Cleopatra, in the Galleria d’Arte del Comune, Palazzo Rosso, Genoa, painted in 1648, shows Cleopatra seated at the end of her bed, her legs hanging down over the side, much as Charity appears in the present composition of four years earlier, especially in the lost compositional study in red chalk recorded in the offset (C. Van Tuyll Serooskerken, Guercino (1591–1666), Drawings from Dutch Collections, Gravenhage, 1991, pp. 130/31, no. 54). The claim made in the Windsor catalogue that there is a connection between the composition of the offset and the Charity in the Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio, is not sustainable in the light of the re-apperance of the present picture.
5). L. Salerno, I dipinti del Guercino, Rome, 1988, p. 268, no. 184; and D. Mahon, Catalogo critico, in: Giovanni Francesco Barbieri Il Guercino 1591-1666, exh. cat. by D. Mahon, Museo Civico Archeologico, Bologna, and Pinacoteca Civica and Chiesa del Rosario, Cento, September to November, 1991, p. 234, no. 84. The exotically dressed Charity refers back to the frescoes of Sibyls in the alternating lunettes of the drum of Piacenza Cathedral, which Guercino painted in 1627, where the figures also wear elaborate headgear, including turbans (for these frescoes, see Salerno, 1988, pp. 203–206, no. 114, M-P). Over his long career, Guercino made several representations of Charity, both drawn and painted. Among these is a famous pen-and-wash drawing of Charity with an old Man, in the British Museum, London, datable in the mid-1620s (inv. no. 1895-9-15-706; pen and brown ink and brown wash; 268 x 417 mm, see N. Turner and C. Plazzotta, Drawings by Guercino from British Collections, London, 1991, p. 82, no. 54, and p. 240, no. 9). A painting of Charity, very probably carried out late in Guercino’s career, is still untraced. It was among a group of pictures by the master, painted at different periods of his career, which were left in his house at his death, and is described as “Una Carità con tre puttini, che scherzano mirabilmente” (Malvasia, 1841, II, p. 27). An upright composition of just such a subject, in which Charity again wears a turban, is recorded in a drawing by Guercino in the British Museum, which this writer previously attributed to Cesare Gennari and now believes to be by Guercino himself (inv. no. 1884-3-8-9, black chalk, 224 x 193 mm, see Turner and Plazzotta, 1991, p. 289, App. no. 120). The British Museum drawing is evidently connected with a painting generally attributed to Cesare Gennari, in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome. This could well turn out to be a studio copy after a lost work by Guercino himself.
6). Salerno, 1988, p. 325, no. 252; and Mahon, 1991, pp. 310/11, no.117.
7). Mahon, 1991, pp. 310/11, no.117.
8). Glasgow, Glasgow Museums, Burrell Collection: inv. no. 36.41; pen and brown ink, with brown wash; 155 x 193 mm (R. Wenley, Guercino in Glasgow, in: Master Drawings, XLVIII, no. 2, 2010, pp. 179–81, fig. 1).
9). For example, the compositional drawing in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle: inv. no. 2681 (Mahon and Turner, 1989, no. 110; N. Turner and C. Plazzotta, Drawings by Guercino from British Collections, London and Rome, pp. 165/66, no. 136).
10). Wenley, 2010, p. 180, and fig. 4. See also E. Negro, M. Pirondini and N. Roio, La scuola del Guercino, Modena, 2004, p. 209 and p. 228, fig. 374, where it is suggested that the painting may be dated early in the 1660s.