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| Guercino Apparition of Christ to his Mother 1628-30 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Civica, Cento |
Stendhal wrote a cultivated and idiosyncratic guide to Rome and neighboring territories in the late 1820s. Among the paintings seen and described, he particularly admired a canvas by Guercino of the late 1620s, The Apparition of Christ to his Mother (above). "Without in any way comparing the artistic range, but merely considering the representation of nature, I think we find many affinities between Shakespeare and Guercino."
This preference revealed somewhat old-fashioned taste in the middle-aged Stendhal. Advanced opinion had already determined to reject Baroque painting wholesale. "There is no entirely sincere or great art in the seventeenth century," as John Ruskin would write a few years later.
The work below all dates from the earliest phase of Guercino's career in the provinces, before the momentous Roman adventures of 1621-23. Sybille Ebert-Schifferer asserts that in this early work can be read Guercino's special intention to "translate freely a textual source into a mood established by purely painterly means ... to break through the picture's surface plane, and thus its ontological boundedness, by using direct gestures extending beyond the frame or by bringing the picture close to the viewer."
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| Guercino Dead Christ mourned by two Angels ca. 1617-18 oil on copper National Gallery, London |
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| Guercino God the Father with Angel 1620 oil on canvas Musei di Strada Nuova, Genoa |
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| Guercino St Charles Borromeo at Prayer 1613-14 canvas Collegiate Church of San Biagio, Cento |
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| Guercino Et in Arcadia ego ca. 1618 oil on canvas Palazzo Barberini, Rome |
The identical shepherd-pair appears in close-up immediately above, and in the background immediately below.
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| Guercino Apollo Flaying Marsyas ca. 1618 oil on canvas Palazzo Pitti, Florence |
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| Guercino Christ and the Samaritan Woman 1619-20 oil on canvas Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth |
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| Guercino William of Aquitaine receives the monastic habit from St Gregory 1620 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna |
In the catalog to the 1992 Guercino retreospective, Andrea Emiliani transcribed an old story about the painting immediately above. Giovanni Battista Passeri claimed that around the year 1660 – ". . . he paid a visit to the Church of San Gregorio in Bologna, along with some of his students, in the company of Guercino, by now an old man. When the students expressed their admiration for Saint William Receives the Monastic Habit, the large altarpiece that Guercino had painted in 1620, the artist's reaction to their compliment was to burst out: "but that was when the pot was really boiling!"
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| Guercino Raising of Lazarus ca. 1619 oil on canvas Louvre |
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| Guercino Erminia and the Shepherd 1619-20 oil on canvas Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery |
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| Guercino Erminia finds the wounded Tancred 1619 oil on canvas Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome |
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| Guercino Return of the Prodigal Son 1619 oil on canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum. Vienna |
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| Guercino Susanna and the Elders 1617 oil on canvas Museo del Prado, Madrid |
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| Guercino Landscape by moonlight 1616 oil on canvas Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
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| Guercino Landscape with Concert 1617 oil on copper Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
Sybille Ebert-Schifferer's essay on the artist appears in the same 1992 catalog from Washington DC – Guercino : Master Painter of the Baroque edited by Sir Denis Mahon, issued to mark the 400th anniversary of the artist's birth. Ebert-Shifferer's is, as always, the strongest contribution, and she it is who crucially points out that as a provincial and as a plebian, Guercino was one of those rare 17th-century Italian painters whose figurative style "appears to have emerged without reference to classical sculpture."