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 :. | Abraham Casting Out Hagar and Ishmael sg | Samson Captured by the Philistines | Allegory of Painting and Sculpture sdg | The Cumaean Sibyl with a Putto | William of Aquitaine Receives the Crown of St.Bishop Felix |
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ANTHONISZ, Aert
Dutch painter (b. 1579/80, Antwerpen, d. 1620, Amsterdam)
PERRONNEAU, Jean-Baptiste
French Rococo Era Painter, ca.1715-1783 French pastellist, painter and engraver. He was, with his older contemporary Maurice Quentin de La Tour, the most important pastel artist and portrait painter in 18th-century France. Perronneau trained first with the engraver Laurent Cars and then with the successful portrait painter Hubert Drouais. His work as an engraver, which includes prints after Charles-Joseph Natoire, Fran?ois Boucher, Edme Bouchardon and Carle Vanloo (see Vaillat and Ratouis de Limay,), did not continue beyond the 1730s. Nevertheless, his involvement with Cars, much of whose work consisted in the reproduction of portraits by artists such as Hyacinthe Rigaud, left its mark on the composition of his pastels, most of which employ the bust-length format, often within a feigned stone oval typical of 17th- and 18th-century engraved portraits. His early pastel portrait of Mme Desfriches (1744; France, A.M. Ratouis de Limay priv. col.), mother of his friend and patron, the Orl?ans collector Aignan-Thomas Desfriches,
Louis Abrahams
1839?C1918