Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino

With Kate Ganz, London and New York, Master Drawings, 1520-1900, 1991, pp. 38-39, no. 5, and p. 152;
sale, London, Christie's, 20 April 1993, lot 83

Bologna, Museo Civico Archeologico, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, Il Guercino, 1591-1666, Disegni, 1991, no. 21 (catalogue by Sir Denis Mahon)

N. Turner and C. Plazzotta, Drawings by Guercino from British Collections, London 1991, p. 58, reproduced p. 56, fig. 7

On the verso there is a thin strip of paper around the margins, creating a window mount. Recto, some brown staining at the upper left and right corners. Scattered foxing at the lower margin. The ink has sunk into the paper, most evident in the head closest to the right margin. The ink, although it has sunk in places, is still strong and vibrant.
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This is a preparatory study for the head of the Bishop and three separate studies for the heads of the two acolytes to his left, in the altarpiece St. William of Aquitaine receiving the monastic habit, painted by Guercino in 1620 for the church of S. Gregorio, Bologna, now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale of the same city (fig. 1).  As noted by Turner (see Literature) the composition of this celebrated altarpiece, the most important commission the painter received before his departure for Rome in 1621, can be followed in a large number of surviving drawings: '...an unrivalled series of more than twenty preparatory studies which bear witness to the extraordinary process that lay behind the invention of the composition'.  The style of the present sheet, as stressed by Turner, can be closely associated with the fascinating sheet of studies for the same composition, including the kneeling figure of St. William, formerly in Sir Denis Mahon's collection and now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.¹  Sir Denis Mahon suggested in the Bologna exhibition catalogue that the female head on the verso must have been drawn after the death of Guercino, when the drawing was in the possession of the Gennari family.  

1.  N. Turner and C. Plazzotta, op. cit., p. 57, no. 27, reproduced; for other related drawings see also nos. 26 and 28