Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called il Guercino

This extensive landscape with fortified buildings and a bridge in the middle distance and a large tree to the left animated by figures in the foreground and strongly lit throughout, is a fine example of Guercino’s talent for creating elaborate imaginary views of this type. Though they were never central to his artistic production, Guercino made landscape drawings for much of his artistic career, and a good number of these drawings have survived, constituting a distinctive section of his oeuvre. These drawings were made for their own sake, not in relation to any painting or print, and although Guercino was surely extremely busy with his numerous commissions and it is hard to imagine he had much time to devote to these sophisticated views, as Denis Mahon and Nicholas Turner observed, ‘the making of such images satisfied a deeper need.’¹

The imaginative process required in inventing finished scenes of this type, which are in many ways more like paintings than drawings in terms of their function and composition, is totally different from the experimental genesis of Guercino’s figure studies, yet just as demanding of the artist’s fecund imagination. Here, Guercino has drawn a fully finished view in pen and brown ink, his favorite media for such drawings. The light is skillfully suggested, creating and diversifying the space within the scene and defining a variety of different planes. The various motifs and planes are fused into a very harmonious composition, which seems to be drawn without any hesitation. 

These grand landscape drawings by Guercino are difficult to date, as they manifest an attachment to the countryside and to the natural world that remained with the artist throughout his life, but one such drawing in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, the Landscape with a winding road leading up to the gate of a town, does bear a dating of 1635 on the verso.² 

^1. D. Mahon and N. Turner, The Drawings of Guercino in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, Cambridge 1989, p. 101

^2. Ibid., p. 107, no. 247, reproduced fig. 231