Word: guercino
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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EXHIBIT: "GUERCINO...
Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666) was known from childhood and, since his death, to art history as Guercino -- "the Squinter." Thus he joins Masaccio ("Tom the Lump") and Sodoma among the notable Italian painters who survive in pejorative nicknames. One flinches to think what this practice might have done to the self-esteem of artists in the late 20th century had it gone...
...beautiful show of Guercino drawings on loan from the Royal Collection in Windsor Castle that opened this month at the Drawing Center in New York City reminds you, moreover, how labile reputation can be. Guercino was one of those 17th century Italian artists who sank under the weight of an earlier age's revival. Critics and collectors at the end of the 19th century were so obsessed with the study and acquisition of Renaissance art that they had little time for the seicento; for them, Italian genius lay in "primitive" gold-ground altarpieces and 15th and 16th century frescoes. Consequently...
...Guercino worked in an age when, although the mechanisms of fame were becoming more centralized, it was still possible to sustain a life's work on a provincial reputation. He lived in Emilia most of his life. But Rome was the great magnet, and he almost made it to the Roman big time when his patron, the Bolognese Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi, became Pope in 1621 and summoned Guercino to the Vatican. There he painted one enormous canvas, the Burial and Reception into Heaven of Saint Petronilla, for an altar in Saint Peter's, but the Pope died...