Guercino

Guercino (gwĕrchē`nō), 1591–1666, Italian painter whose original name was Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, b. near Bologna. He studied with Ludovico Carracci. Between 1621 and 1623 he was in Rome, where he painted the ceiling frescos of the Casino Ludovisi and his superb Burial of St. Petronilla (Capitoline Mus., Rome). The classicist tendencies prevalent in Rome caused him to alter his style so that he never equaled the dramatic intensity of his early work. An extensive collection of his drawings is in the Royal Library at Windsor.

Bibliography

See D. Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory (1947).

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Guercino 

(pseudonym of Giovanni Francesco Barbieri). Baptized Feb. 8, 1591, in Cento, Emilia-Romagna Province; died Dec. 22, 1666, in Bologna. Italian painter of the Bologna school.

Guercino studied in Cento and was influenced by L. Car-racci, Caravaggio, the Venetian artists, and G. Reni. He worked primarily in Cento and Bologna, but also in Venice (1618), Ferrara (1619), Rome (1621-23), Piacenza (1626-27), and Modena (1633-34). From 1642 he headed the Bologna Academy. In his best works, painted during 1610-20 (frescoes in the Casino Ludovisi, Rome, 1621; The Burial of St. Petronilla, 1621, the Capitoline Museum, Rome; The Ascension of the Madonna, 1623, the Hermitage, Leningrad), Guercino sought to combine a lifelike quality, dramatic emotional images, compositional dynamism, and sharp contrasts of light and shade with the splendid decorative manner of Carracci and with baroque effects. Guercino unequivocally adopted the academic style in the late 1620’s.

REFERENCES

Grimaldi, N. II Guercino. Bologna, 1968.
II Guercino: Catalogo critico dei dipinti. Bologna, 1968.