Guercino

Drawn in the style that Guercino used in his early career, with wash used to depict a bold chiaroscuro that both highlights and fragments forms, this study has long been associated with a painting that Guercino originally delivered in 1618 to the church of Sta. Maria Annunziata in Cento.(1) The painting and drawing have generally been identified as The Madonna del Carmine bestowing the scapular on St. Albert, with St. Francis and another Franciscan, and indeed, a related engraving of 1623 by Giovanni Battista Pasqualini identifies the scene as the Madonna del Carmine with St. Albert.(2) St. Albert of Jerusalem was from the town of Castel Gualtieri in Emilia, not far from Cento, but the vision of the Madonna bestowing the scapular was not his, but rather that of another Carmelite, St. Simon Stock. It is also St. Simon Stock rather than St. Albert who is associated with the saving of souls from purgatory, as seen in the distance at left in Guercino's altarpiece. The documents associated with the painting identify it merely as the altarpiece of the Madonna del Carmine, but eighteenth-century sources describe it as depicting St. Simon Stock.(3) Moreover, there was a local tradition for depicting St. Simon Stock, with roughly contemporary examples including Alessandro Tiarini's Vision of St. Simon Stock of ca. 1610-20 (Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna) and several paintings by Scarsellino including The Virgin adored by saints of ca. 1609 (Metropolitan Museum of Art), in which St. Simon Stock receives the scapular from the Virgin in the presence of Franciscan and Dominican saints. We are thus left with two equally unlikely scenarios: one in which Pasqualini misidentified the saint in Guercino's altarpiece, and another in which Guercino was asked to depict the Carmelite St. Albert (always a somewhat obscure figure in the history of art) but mistakenly showed him in the guise of St. Simon Stock, perhaps based on other local pictures. Long debated, the question remains open.
Iconography aside, the painting and its related drawings reflect Guercino's lasting admiration of Ludovico Carracci's Holy Family with St. Francis, angels, and donors of 1591, the so-called Cento Madonna (Pinacoteca, Cento), painted for the Capuchin church in Cento and arguably the single most important influence on the young Guercino's style. The brightly lit Virgin in the upper part of Guercino's painting, and especially the prominent, expressive hands of the saints below, owe much to Ludovico's example.
Although the Morgan drawing includes the four primary figures seen in the final painting, the dynamic monk at far right in the drawing has become a restrained, almost self-contained figure in the painting. Moreover, Guercino was paid the relatively low price of only 218 lire for the altarpiece (typically his rate for two full-length figures), and Pasqualini's print shows only the central saint and the Virgin and Child, omitting the saints at right. This has led to the presumption that Guercino, who was in Bologna for much of 1617 at work on paintings for Cardinal Ludovisi, allowed his studio assistant Lorenzo Gennari to paint the two background saints.(4) Apart from the changes to the saint at far right and the pattern of light and shadow on the Virgin, the Morgan drawing is fairly close to the final composition. Nonetheless, as is often the case with Guercino, it is difficult to place the known preparatory drawings in a clear sequence. The scene at left in the painting, showing the saving of souls from purgatory, is absent from the Morgan drawing, although it is already present in another drawing in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon.(5) Additional drawings formerly at Chatsworth,(6) in the Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo,(7) and in the National Gallery of Ireland(8) develop other aspects of the composition, with the last, a red chalk study, coming close to the pose--if not the lighting--of the Virgin and Child as seen in the painting.
The squaring seen on this sheet is unusual in Guercino's work, and the differences between the drawing and painting make it unlikely that Guercino himself drew this squaring to transfer the composition to the canvas. It might have been used by Pasqualini in the production of his print, although one cannot rule out that it was added later by a collector or dealer who wished to make the drawing seem more like an important preparatory study. -- Catalog entry: John Marciari. Guercino : virtuoso draftsman. Morgan Library & Museum, 2019, p. 31-32.
References:
(1) Mahon 1968a, no. 7, dated the painting to ca. 1615, recognizing it as a notably early work, but documents discovered and published by Mischiati in Chiappini et al. 1975 revealed payments in 1618 both to the carpenter for the stretcher and to Guercino for the painting. The painting was moved to the Pinacoteca after the suppression of the church in the Napoleonic era.
(2) See Bagni 1988, no. 70.
(3) See Fausto Gozzi's entry on the painting in D'Amico, Gozzi, and Emiliani 1985, no. 55.
(4) The attribution of the background figures to Lorenzo Gennari was first advanced by Mahon, but Salerno, Turner, Van Tuyll, and Stone have all subsequently repeated and endorsed the hypothesis.
(5) Inv. ca 793. Copies of this drawing are in the Royal Collection, Windsor, inv. RCIN 902479, and in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, inv. NMH 800/1863.
(6) Sold Christie's, London, 3 July 1984, lot 19. 7 Inv. B 15236; see Stone 1991a, 10. 8 Inv. NGI.2603.
(7) Inv. B 15236; see Stone 1991a, 10.
(8) Inv. NGI.2603.