Guercino

This imposing drawing of the Madonna of Humility, the Virgin seated on the ground in a landscape with the Christ Child in her lap, does not correspond to a painting by Guercino and seems instead to have been made as an end in itself. It is a moving composition, with the sleeping child, his head in deep shadow, alluding to the Pietà, in which the dead body of the adult Christ is laid across the Virgin's lap in a similar position. The Virgin here betrays no emotion but instead sits contemplating her son in a pose as solid and timeless as the distant rocky hills, whose shape echoes her own. It is a notably painterly and poetic drawing by Guercino, and the dense layers of wash as well as the large format likewise suggest that it was an independent exercise rather than a preparatory sketch. The density of the corrosive iron gall ink has caused the drawing to suffer over the centuries, as often happens with the artist's work. Additional areas of damage extend even beyond the ink; these perhaps result from the drawing having hung on a wall for part of its history, before being firmly laid down on the present mount, which likely dates from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. As an autonomous drawing and on a larger than usual scale, the Virgin and Child in a landscape is more difficult to date than are Guercino's preparatory studies, a difficulty compounded by the sheet's compromised condition. The rendering of the Virgin's head and face and the monumental seated figure, akin to those of the Piacenza frescoes, most likely indicate a date in the late 1620s or early 1630s, although the sleeping child is reminiscent of that in the Rest on the Flight into Egypt that Guercino painted for Palazzo Lancellotti in Rome in 1624 (now at the Cleveland Museum of Art). A drawing of Charity in the British Museum, also from the mid-1620s, has a similar density of wash and a certain compositional resonance with the seated woman juxtaposed with a pyramidal rock in the background; the facial types in the Charity, however, are typical of Guercino's earlier works and differ from those of the Morgan drawing. While allowing for the possibility of an earlier date, it seems most likely that Guercino drew the Morgan sheet in the 1630s with his earlier works in mind. -- Catalog entry: Guercino : virtuoso draftsman, Morgan Library & Museum, 2019, p. 54.