Читать книгу A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools - National Gallery (Great Britain) - Страница 41

Guercino (Eclectic-Bologna: 1591-1666).

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri was called Guercino, the Squintling, from an accident which distorted his right eye in babyhood. He attained to much fame and wealth in his day; but was self-taught, and the son of humble parents, his father being a wood-carrier, and agreeing to pay for his son's education by a load of grain and a vat of grapes delivered yearly. As a young man, he settled in Rome, where he became acquainted with Caravaggio. He returned to his native town, Cento, in 1623, and there founded an academy which was much frequented by young painters. In 1642 he removed to Bologna, where he died in affluent circumstances in 1666. In art history Guercino is interesting as showing the blending of the Eclectic style of the Carracci with the Naturalistic style of Caravaggio. In the work of his latest, or Bolognese, period, "when he appears to have endeavoured to approximate to the style of Guido, he forsook the vigorous handling and treatment of his earlier pictures and fell into an insipid manner" (Burton). Guercino (says Symonds) "lived the life of an anchorite, absorbed in studies, reserved, sober, pious, truthful, sincere in his commerce with the world, unaffectedly virtuous, devoted to his art and God." In the motives of his picture one sees reflected the Catholic revival of his day, – "the Christianity of the age was not naïve, simple, sincere, and popular, but hysterical, dogmatic, hypocritical, and sacerdotal. It was not Christianity indeed, but Catholicism galvanised by terror into reactionary movement" (Renaissance, vii. 232).

A comparison even of this little picture – in its somewhat morbid sentiment – with such an one as Crivelli's (602) – with its deeper because simpler feeling – well illustrates the nature of the change. This is, however, one of Guercino's best works. It was formerly in the Borghese Gallery, and Rumohr, in his account of that collection (1784), notices it as one of the productions of the painter's best time. "The figure of Christ is admirable in drawing and foreshortening, and painted with a broad decisive touch in really astonishing relief; while the weeping angels, if not of an elevated type, are marked by a real naïveté and sincerity of pathos. The wonderful chiaroscuro is here not only rich, and well concentrated, too, beyond the painter's wont, but impressive, and duly accounted for by the supernatural luminosity of the body of Christ" (Portfolio, August 1891).