Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1591-1666 best known as Guercino or Il Guercino, was an Italian Baroque painter from the region of Emilia, and active in Rome and Bologna. Guercino is Italian for squinter, a nickname that was given to him because he was cross-eyed. He is especially noted for his many superb drawings. Guercino was born at Cento, a village between Bologna and Ferrara. By the age of 17 he was associated with Benedetto Gennari, a painter of the Bolognese School. By 1615 he moved to Bologna, where his work earned the praise of an elder Ludovico Carracci. He painted two large canvases, Elijah Fed by Ravens and Samson Seized by Philistines, in what appears to be a stark naturalist Caravaggesque style (although it is unlikely he had been able to see any of the Roman Caravaggios first-hand). They were painted for Cardinal Serra, Papal Legate to Ferrara. The Arcadian Shepherds (Et in Arcadia ego) was painted in 1618 contemporary with The Flaying of Marsyas by Apollo in Palazzo Pitti. His first style, he often claimed, was influenced by a canvas of Carracci in Cento. Some of his later pieces approach rather to the manner of his great contemporary Guido Reni, and are painted with more lightness and clearness. Guercino was esteemed very highly in his lifetime. He was then recommended by Marchese Enzo Bentivoglio to the Bolognese Ludovisi Pope, Pope Gregory XV. His two years (1621-23) spent in Rome were very productive. From this stay date his frescoes of Aurora at the casino of the Villa Ludovisi and the ceiling in San Crisogono (1622) of San Chrysogonus in Glory; his portrait of Pope Gregory (now in the Getty Museum, and, what is considered his masterpiece, The Burial of Saint Petronilla or St. Petronilla Altarpiece, for the Vatican (now in the Museo Capitolini). The Franciscan order of Reggio in 1655 paid him 300 ducats for the altarpiece of Saint Luke Displaying a Painting of the Madonna and Child (now in Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City). The Corsini also paid him 300 ducats for the Flagellation of Christ painted in 1657.   Related Paintings of GUERCINO :. | St William of Aquitaine Receiving the Cowln ngb | raising of lazarus | The Raising of Lazarus | The Dying Cleopatra | Et in Arcadia Ego kh |
Related Artists:
DADDI, Bernardo
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, active ca.1290-1348
E.Munier
French 1810-1895
VARIN, Quentin
French Painter, ca.1570-1634 French painter. He was the son of a shoemaker and from 1597 to 1600 was in the papal territory of Avignon, where he worked with a local painter, Pierre Duplan ( fl late 16th century), enrolling also in the local painters' guild. By 1607 he had returned to northern France, and he was married that year at Amiens. In 1612 he was working in the Norman village of Les Andelys, and there he became Nicolas Poussin's first master. For the Gothic church of Notre-Dame, Le Grand Andely, he produced in 1612 a Martyrdom of St Vincent, a Martyrdom of St Clarus and a Regina Coeli (all in situ), the works that provided Poussin with his first contact with contemporary painting. These are the earliest fixed points in Varin's oeuvre, although a ruined Rock of the Philosophers (Rouen, Mus. B.-A.), reminiscent of such late 16th-century French Mannerist painters as Antoine Caron,