Guercino

Related Category: European Art, 1600 to the Present: Biographies

(gwĕrchē´nō), 1591–1666, Italian painter whose original name was Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, b. near Bologna. He studied with Ludovico Carracci. Between 1621 and 1623 he was in Rome, where he painted the ceiling frescos of the Casino Ludovisi and his superb Burial of St. Petronilla (Capitoline Mus., Rome). The classicist tendencies prevalent in Rome caused him to alter his style so that he never equaled the dramatic intensity of his early work. An extensive collection of his drawings is in the Royal Library at Windsor.

See D. Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory (1947).