Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called il Guercino

Unframed. Attached at the left and lower right corners. A strip of paper attached to each edge of the drawing with bears inventory numbering from the Dubini collection: 188/235. A light brown spot just below the neck of the figure, visible in the catalogue. The lower right corner is torn and made up. A trace of a diagonal fold across the upper left corner, which also has some creases. The verso bears the old attribution, Calabrese. The paper is less green than the catalogue illustration and the chalk is stronger.
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This fascinating double-sided sheet has recently been recognized as an early work by Guercino.  Nicholas Turner has confirmed the attribution, and also the connection with the artist's 1624 painting of The Virgin and Child appearing to St. Lawrence, executed for the seminary church at Finale nell'Emilia and still in situ.¹  As noted by Turner in a letter to the previous owner, the head corresponds closely to that of the deacon saint kneeling in the picture. Turner also opines that the drawing must have been executed fairly late in the planning of the composition, after the very carefully drawn finished study of the same head in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle.² The Windsor study, executed in red chalk and slight stumping on greenish-grey paper, was first associated with the Finale nell'Emilia altarpiece by Carol Plazzotta, at the time of the 1991 British Museum exhibition of Guercino's drawings.³  Previously it was thought to be related to a much later commission, The Calling of the Blessed Luigi Gonzaga. Nicholas Turner believes that although the study at Windsor may have been used as guidance for the finished painted head, 'there must have been something about the youth's perhaps too dreamy expression that prompted him to go back to the live model and capture a more vibrant, lifelike impulse to the head, as is so clearly expressed in your drawing and which is similarly so well conveyed in that of the painting.'

The use of black, rather charcoal-like chalk combined with light touches of white chalk is also characteristic of some early studies by Guercino. Turner has pointed out the stylistic similarities with a study of the Head of a Blind Girl, now in a private collection, which Guercino made in connection with his altarpiece depicting The Miracle of S. Carlo Borromeo, executed circa 1613-14 for the parish church in Renazzo di Cento.⁴ The study of a foot on the verso of the present sheet cannot be definitely connected, although Turner has suggested it may also have been made in connection with the figure of St. Lawrence in the Finale nell'Emilia altarpiece, where the Saint's right foot is shown in a similar position.

1. L. Salerno, I Dipinti del Guercino, Rome 1988, p. 183, no. 101 
2. See D. Mahon and N. Turner, The Drawings of Guercino... at Windsor Castle, Cambridge 1989, no.128, reproduced
2. N. Turner and C. Plazzotta, Drawings by Guercino from British Collections, exh. cat., London, British Museum, 1991, pp. 79-80, no. 50, reproduced fig. 50
3. See N. Turner, 'Two drawings by Guercino for his early altarpiece at Renazzo di Cento', The Burlington Magazine, vol. CXXX, July 1988, p. 532, reproduced fig. 54