Provenance

Sale: London, Sotheby’s, 28 June 1979, lot 145, illustrated

Private collection, Geneva

Literature

L. Giles, et al., Italian Master Drawings from the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, 2014, p. 148, fig. 60.2, illustrated, p. 149, n. 14 (catalogue entry by D. Stone)

N. Turner, The Paintings of Guercino, A Revised and Expanded Catalogue raisonné, Rome, 2017, p. 503, under cat. no. 213, fig. 213.c

J. Marciari, Guercino: Virtuoso Draftsman, New York, The Morgan Library & Museum, exhibition catalogue, 4 October 2019 – 2 February 2020, pp. 73-74, fig. 18.3

This energetic and fluid study shows the two figures at the far right of The Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew, an altarpiece commissioned from Guercino for the church San Martino in Siena in 1635-36 and now little more than a wreck.¹ The commission was one of the most important projects undertaken by Guercino during the 1630s and inspired him to make a particularly fine group of drawings in preparation.² The present sheet can be included among these for the first time.  Two of the sheets focus on the secondary characters in the painting: ours, and a study at the Teylers Museum, Haarlem, for the revelatory angel in the top register of the painting.³ The others show Bartholomew and the figures immediately around him.

The present drawing corresponds relatively closely to the finished picture; the soldier’s gesture in the painting is less animated, while he and the bearded man behind him no longer direct their gaze upwards toward the angel. Guercino sketched two possibilities for the soldier’s right arm and hand, one in which he leans on a stick and one in which he reaches across his chest for a knife. In the end he retained the first solution with some alterations. It is a good illustration of the complex practice that lay behind Guercino’s creative process. He rarely drew finished composition studies, instead relying on a fluid series of sketches for single figures or groups of figures, which were subject to constant change and development. The violence of the soldier’s gesture and the terror in the old man’s expression are less pronounced in the finished picture.

Although preparatory sketches were private exercises not intended as public statements, the subtle use of wash and the delicacy of the lines give the present drawing a virtuosity in execution that compares to a finished picture. Guercino was immensely proud of his drawings and kept them to serve as a repertory of figural poses and compositional ideas that could inspire other motifs.

Bartholomew was one of the twelve apostles and according to the traditional account he was flayed alive and then crucified with his head downwards. A correspondent to this New Testament story in antiquity is the flaying of Marsyas by Apollo, a subject that was also treated by Guercino.