Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino

The present study by Guercino is not dissimilar to the figure of Christ in the Ecce Homo executed by Guercino for the Marchese Giovanni Nicolò Tanari, and paid for in November 1647, now in Munich.¹ The Tanari painting, for which a number of drawings by Guercino and his workshop are known,² is horizontal in format and represents Christ standing at the centre, flanked by Pontius Pilate and a soldier in armour.

In this drawing, however, Christ, looking up to the left, is the sole protagonist of the scene and more importantly he is drawn seated rather than standing, unlike all the other known drawn and painted versions of this subject.

David Stone observed that one of the three other known studies related to the Tanari commission, executed in red chalk and now in the Morgan Library, appears also to have begun as a drawing of Christ alone, but that Guercino added strips of paper to the left and right of Christ, before inserting the head of a soldier with a plumed helmet on the strip to the left.³

Guercino revisited this theme twelve years later, in 1659, in a vertical composition executed for Prince Ludovisi and now in the Galleria Sabauda, Turin, in which Christ appears with a soldier in armour to the left.⁴  For this commission Guercino must have revisited his earlier ideas for a depiction of the subject, in which he experimented, through an outpouring of drawings, with a number of different solutions to the iconography.

Stylistically it is more likely that the present drawing dates to the 1650s, suggesting it might relate to this later commission. According to the biographer Malvasia, the painting for Prince Ludovisi started as a single figure of Christ, and the patron made Guercino add the soldier to the left.⁵

^1.Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, inv. 229; N. Turner, The Paintings of Guercino, Rome 2017, p. 640, cat. 345, reproduced

^2.For a complete account of the related drawings see J. Marciari, Guercino: virtuoso draftsman, New York 2019, pp. 97-103

^3.New York, Morgan Library & Museum, inv. no. I, 101b; Idem, loc. cit., cat. 31, reproduced, and p. 103

^4.Turin, Galleria Sabauda, inv. 146; Turner, op. cit., p. 749, cat. 472, reproduced

^5. C. C. Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice: Vite de'pittori bolognesi, Bologna 1678, vol. II, p. 382; Malvasia’s account seems unlikely, as Guercino usually knew in advance the number of figures he needed to paint, which determined the price of a painting, as did whether the figures were shown full-length or half-length