Guercino

Guercino returned numerous times to the charming motif of the infant Christ holding or otherwise being distracted by a bird, as seen in early paintings such as The Madonna of the Swallow of ca. 1615-16 and in drawings such as The infant Christ holding a bird, with St. Joseph of around 1621. There is a long tradition of showing the Christ Child with a goldfinch, which was understood to foreshadow Christ's Passion: according to legend, a goldfinch, whose diet consisted of thistle and thorny plants, had pecked at Christ's crown of thorns, and this is the reason for the distinctive red head feathers of the European goldfinch. Guercino seems to have been less interested, however, in the symbolism of the motif than in its playful possibilities. Sometime in the mid-1630s, Guercino devised a red chalk drawing of The Virgin and Child with an escaped goldfinch (National Gallery of Art, Washington; inv. 1996.21.1), an amusing scene in which a distressed child holds one half of a fluttering cord that has just snapped, allowing the bird to escape. The drawing is not connected to any known painting project; it was probably made as an independent work, not unlike other red chalk drawings. Guercino took up the motif again in the present work, which must likewise have been an end in itself. To judge from the smoother handling of the chalk, the figure types, and the generally calmer, quieter composition, the Morgan version is probably ten or fifteen years later than the Washington sheet, from the late 1640s or around 1650. -- Catalog entry: Guercino, virtuoso draftsman, Morgan Library & Museum, 2019, p. 106