Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called il Guercino

(Cento 1591-1666 Bologna)

A study of putti for the Madonna del Rosario, Osimo

Footnotes

Provenance
From an album of 28 drawings by Guercino, purchased, probably in Bologna or Florence, between 1741 and 1746, by John Chaloner Chute (1701-76), who was resident in Italy during that period, and thence by descent in the Chute family, the Vyne, Basingstoke, Hants
Their sale, Sotheby's, London, 22 June, 1949, lot 1, where purchased by
R. E. A. Wilson (who broke up the album, selling the drawings individually)¹
Private Collection, UK

Literature
D. Mahon and N. Turner, The Drawings of Guercino in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, Cambridge, 1989, pp. 57-8, under no. 98, and p. 188


The drawing is one of 28 red chalk studies by Guercino from an album, known as the Chute album, sold in a single lot at Sotheby's, London, in 1949 (see above). The studies must have been selected c. 1740 from the quantities of such red chalk drawings by the master which had passed by descent, along with the rest of his estate, to the painter's heirs, the Gennari family of Bologna. The intention of grouping them together in an album seems almost certainly to have been to sell it to a visitor on the Grand Tour, many of whom were British and Irish travellers and eagerly on the look-out for drawings by Italian masters. The purchaser was John Chaloner Chute, a friend of Horace Walpole (1717-1797), who acquired it during his Italian stay (1741-46), very likely in either Bologna or Florence, and it remained in the possession of his family until 1949.

At the time of its sale, or soon after, the late Sir Denis Mahon connected the present drawing with the putti in the upper half of The Madonna of the Rosary, with Saints Dominic and Catherine of Siena, an altarpiece that Guercino painted in 1642 for San Marco, Osimo, still in situ (fig. 1).²This had been commissioned in fulfilment of the wishes of Cardinal Agostino Galamini, bishop of Osimo and titular Cardinal of the church of the Aracoeli, in Rome, who had died in 1639. Guercino received a down-payment in August, 1641.³ In Malvasia's list of the painter's commissions, the altarpiece is cited under 1642, the year when it was designed and executed.⁴

In the picture, four putti appear in the sky to either side of the Virgin and Child in glory, one to the left and three to the right. They are winged and proffer or scatter roses in recognition of Saints Dominic and Catherine below.⁵ The Virgin and Child each hand a rosary to the saints as they kneel to receive them. The roses flourished by the putti in the sky are an allusion to these rosaries, or strings of beads. A worshipper praying to the Virgin uses these beads as mnemonic cues so that his prayers are said in correct order. Saints Dominic and Catherine are associated with the recitation of such prayers and so, too, with rosaries.

The ex-Chute drawing was made early on in the preparatory process of the altarpiece. Of the four, two are winged and two hold roses. Only the putto in the centre is winged and has flowers in one hand. The pair of putti to the right of the drawing, one above the other, seems to be for the middle and lower putti in the upper right of the picture, but in reverse.⁶ The putto flying towards the spectator in the centre of the sheet presages the child angel in the top right, again in reverse. The one mostly in shadow, upper left, prefigures the solitary winged cherub in the top left.

Two pen-and-ink drawings for the same group of putti to the upper right of the altarpiece have survived. One, formerly in the collection of Sir J. C. Robinson, was offered at Millon, Paris, on 15 June 2015, and is a study for the same pair seen to the right of the ex-Chute drawing, but in reverse and so in the same sense as their painted equivalents, from which, however, they differ in many respects.⁷In the ex-Sir J. C. Robinson collection drawing one of the putti holds a vase from which he takes the roses he is about to scatter.

The second pen-and-ink drawing, Study of Two Putti among Clouds, formerly Sotheby's, London, present whereabouts unknown, is in a similar, engraver-like style to that just mentioned (fig. 2).⁸ The two putti in this ex-Sotheby's drawing this time correspond, with differences, to those at the top and centre of the same group of three in the top right of the altarpiece.

We are grateful to Nicholas Turner for preparing this catalogue note.


 
Notes
¹ Sir Denis once told me that in order to have a record of the album's contents, he hired a photographer to take black-and-white photographs of all the drawings before the 1949 sale, while the volume was at Sotheby's. These still exist and are kept in his archive, now in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. All of this material is undergoing conservation treatment prior to being made available to the public. Sir Denis himself was to own two of the drawings, now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (see D. Mahon and D. Ekserdjian, Guercino Drawings from the Collections of Denis Mahon and the Ashmolean Museum, 1986, nos 28-9). There were six sheets from the album in the British Museum's exhibition, Drawings by Guercino from British Collections, London, 1991, including the two from the Mahon collection. They are nos 55, 66, 73, 125, 135 and 138 of the British Museum catalogue.
² L. Salerno, I dipinti del Guercino, Rome, 1988, p. 282, no. 202.
³ Il libro dei conti del Guercino 1629-1666 (a cura di B. Ghelfi), Bologna, 1997, pp. 110-11, no. 257.
⁴ C. C. Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice, 1678, II, p. 373; 1841, II, p. 265.
⁵ One other painting from Guercino's mature period includes a putto holding a bunch of roses. This is Madonna of the Rosary, with Sts Dominic and Catherine of Siena, painted in 1637 for the Chiesa di San Domenico, Turin, also still in situ, in which the putto strides upright in the air, his body in shadow, as he lowers his bouquet towards the head of the Christ Child (Salerno, 1988, p. 255, no. 168).
⁶ While planning a composition with drawings, Guercino often reversed his figures to determine if they worked better the other way round. This seems to have occurred with three out of the four figures studied here. Two offsets from the present drawing, crudely retouched in the eighteenth century, are preserved in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, providing evidence that such a reversal occurred (Mahon and Turner, 1989, p. 188, nos 642-3).
⁷ Pen and brown ink; 205 x 280 mm. The drawing is numbered on the reverse in the hand of Paolo Antonio Barbieri: 22/700. Formerly the collection of J C Robinson (L1433)
⁸ Pen and brown ink; 199 x 176 mm (Mahon and Turner, 1989, pp. 57-8, under no. 98). The drawing was sold at Sotheby's, London, 21 November 1974, lot 55).