The Vision of The Squinter

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EXHIBIT: "GUERCINO"

WHERE: THE DRAWING CENTER, NEW YORK CITY

WHAT: 60 DRAWINGS FROM THE ROYAL COLLECTION IN WINDSOR CASTLE

THE BOTTOM LINE: These superb, spontaneous works show a 17th century master at his best.

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666) was known from childhood and, since his death, to art history as Guercino -- "the Squinter." Thus he joins Masaccio ("Tom the Lump") and Sodoma among the notable Italian painters who survive in pejorative nicknames. One flinches to think what this practice might have done to the self-esteem of artists in the late 20th century had it gone on.

The beautiful show of Guercino drawings on loan from the Royal Collection in Windsor Castle that opened this month at the Drawing Center in New York City reminds you, moreover, how labile reputation can be. Guercino was one of those 17th century Italian artists who sank under the weight of an earlier age's revival. Critics and collectors at the end of the 19th century were so obsessed with the study and acquisition of Renaissance art that they had little time for the seicento; for them, Italian genius lay in "primitive" gold-ground altarpieces and 15th and 16th century frescoes. Consequently, Guercino, like a number of his contemporaries -- Guido Reni and the Carraccis, for instance, or even Caravaggio -- was slighted. The first Guercino exhibition was not held until three centuries after his death, in his ! birthplace in central Italy, the small Emilian city of Cento, in 1967. His rediscovery was due almost entirely to the love and labors of one English art historian, the late Denis Mahon, who wrote the basic texts on him, defined the canon of his work and was probably the last connoisseur to "own" single- handedly a major European artist in this way.

Guercino worked in an age when, although the mechanisms of fame were becoming more centralized, it was still possible to sustain a life's work on a provincial reputation. He lived in Emilia most of his life. But Rome was the great magnet, and he almost made it to the Roman big time when his patron, the Bolognese Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi, became Pope in 1621 and summoned Guercino to the Vatican. There he painted one enormous canvas, the Burial and Reception into Heaven of Saint Petronilla, for an altar in Saint Peter's, but the Pope died in 1623, and back to Cento the painter went. Later he moved to nearby Bologna. Guercino had a steady stream of commissions from local churches in Emilia, but from Rome's point of view he was overshadowed by other Bolognese virtuosi who worked in the metropolis: the Carraccis and especially Reni.

And in fact, Guercino did not have Reni's breathtaking skill as a painter. But he was not afflicted by Reni's sentimentality either, and where he shone, as this compact and rewarding show makes clear, was in the act of drawing. By comparison with his preparatory drawings, Guercino's final paintings are quite often labored and stodgy. It is the drawings that contain his finest and most spontaneously registered perceptions, and fortunately many survive. George III, an avid collector, acquired nearly 350 of them, of which 60 are in the Drawing Center's show, and this can be only a fraction of the stream of sketches and preliminary studies, caricatures and genre scenes that flowed from Guercino's hand.