Beschreibung:

GIOVANNI FRANCESCO BARBIERI CALLED IL GUERCINO (ITALIAN 1591-1666)
YOUNG DAVID
Oil on canvas
69 x 56cm (27 x 22 in.)
This unpublished canvas may be identified as the 'testa di un davide' that Guercino painted for his friend Gerolamo Panesi and for which he was paid 30 scudi on 16 October 1649.1 In her comment to the above entry in her 1997 edition of Guercino's Account Book, Barbara Ghelfi noted that a canvas corresponding to this payment had yet to be identified.
 
In the painting, David holds the sword with which he had beheaded Goliath. Rather than engage the spectator he stares into the distance, as if pondering the consequences of his victory. The velvety paint textures, the attractive colouring, the figure's classical pose and the delicate rendering of selected details fit perfectly with Guercino's mid-Bolognese period. The occasional flourishes of impasto that punctuate the smooth paint surface include the plume on David's cap and the fur of the lining to his cloak, especially where it touches and slightly overlaps his right thumb. The beguiling combinations of a narrow range of forceful secondary colours, mostly of neighbouring hue, may also be seen in the Cleopatra, now in a private collection, which Panesi ordered from Guercino only a few months later.2
 
In 1648-1650 Panesi commissioned at least five pictures from Guercino. Panesi was a Genoese nobleman and art dealer and, during the artist's Bolognese period, was one of his more consistent and discerning clients, selling on some of the pictures he had commissioned from the master at a higher price in Rome, where he was mainly resident.3 Guercino stuck resolutely to his tariffs, yet somehow Panesi was able to persuade the painter to give him a discount, for example by reducing his standard-sized canvases in return for dropping his charge.
 
In the following year, Guercino painted a 'Meza Figura del davide con la Testa di Golia Gigante' for a Sig. Lodovico Fermi of Piacenza, for which he was paid 75 scudi on 12 October 1650.4 Fermi's David is known from two versions-the actual-sized sketch in the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, and the finished picture, now in a private collection.5 Both correspond almost exactly in size and are significantly larger than the present picture. 6 In format, a half-length was the next size up from a head-and-shoulders and it generally included extra details, such as, in this instance, Goliath's severed head. Fermi paid Guercino 75 scudi for his picture, as compared to Panesi's 30 scudi, for a picture just over half the size of Fermi's, painted in the previous year.
 
With such a busy practice, Guercino was inevitably asked to paint the same subject several times, especially for his half-lengths and heads. A commission for a subject, perhaps painted previously on other occasions, required a fresh invention. Guercino could avoid repetitions by referencing past drawings, but inevitably one compositional treatment morphed subtly into the next. From the point of view of Guercino's creative method, much may be learned by comparing Panesi's David with Fermi's, since similarities and differences abound, in costume, pose, studio props and facture.
 
Two further works by Guercino, both half-lengths, connect in design with the present picture. The first is a drawing in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, ascribed to Guercino but clearly by him. Despite the composition's half-length format, it could well have been made as a study for this canvas, with the head of Goliath included as an alternative to David's sword.7 Notwithstanding these differences, the overall correspondence is close. The second is a painting formerly in the collection of the King of Sardegna, now belonging to the Galleria Sabauda, Turin, presently on show at the Venaria Reale, which is reproduced here from a lithograph by Luigi Poggioli.8 As here, Goliath's head is absent from the composition of the Turin picture. Its larger size and the introduction of the regal columnar architecture in the background bring it nearer to Fermi's canvas.
 
Strong echoes of the present painting are easily to be found in the Windsor drawing and the Turin picture. But it is the hybrid format of the present canvas that pins it down as the one ordered by Panesi. It is a reduced-sized half-length and is bigger and has more detail than Guercino's normal head-and-shoulders format. This rare exception to the painter's rule was probably the result of Panesi's successful haggling.
 
Notes:
 
1). B. Ghelfi (ed.), Il libro dei conti del Guercino, 1629-1666, Bologna, 1997, p. 143, no. 413. When the picture was first shown to me, on 17 January 2013, I wrongly attributed it to Guercino's nephew Cesare Gennari Five years later, following my immersion in Guercino's works in preparation for my monograph on him published last year, the presence of the master's hand is all too clear to me, and I now have no hesitation in giving the picture to him in full.
2). N. Turner, The Paintings of Guercino. A Revised and Expanded Catalogue raisonné, Rome, 2017, p. 662, cat 372
3). N. Turner, 'Mola's Caricature Portrait of the Genoese Collector and Dealer Gerolamo Panesi,' Master Drawings, xlvii, no 4 (2009), pp. 516-9.
4). Ghelfi 1997, p. 149, no. 430.
5). Turner 2017, pp. 667-8, nos 377I and II, respectively.
6). The Tokyo canvas measures 120.5 x 102 cm, the finished version in a private collection 120 x 100 cm.
7). Windsor Castle, Royal Library: inv. 2944 (Mahon and Turner 1989, no. 408): pen and brown ink; 203 x 161 mm.
8). A. Alberghini, Guercino: La collezione di stampe, Cento, 1991, p. 217, no. 435.
We are grateful to Nicholas Turner for his expertise and assistance in writing this catalogue entry.