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Updated: May 13, 2025
He was interested in many artists in many fields of art, yet it seems impossible for him to be interested in any who were not second-rate or altogether inferior: Abt Vogler, Galuppi, Guercino, Andrea del Sarto, and the rest. One might hesitate indeed to call Filippo Lippi inferior, but the Evil Genius still stands by, and from Browning's hands Lippi escapes a very poor creature.
Why then should people pretend insensibility, when divine Guercino exerts his unrivalled powers of the pathetic in the fine picture at Zampieri palace, of Hagar's dismission into the desert with her son?
In the Palazzo Falconeri there is a beautiful St. Cecilia, by Guercino; a holy family, by Raphael; and a fine expressive figure of St. Peter weeping, by Dominechino. In the Palazzo Altieri, I admired a picture, by Carlo Maratti, representing a saint calling down lightning from heaven to destroy blasphemers. It was the figure of the saint I admired, merely as a portrait.
The greatest excellence of this art was of short duration; it declined as did the literature, and indeed, the sacred and political institutions of Italy in the seventeenth century. It should not, however, be forgotten, that the best works of Guercino, the later pictures of Annibale Carracci, and the important works of Domenichino and Salvator Rosa belong to this period.
That history does, in truth, present to the mind a long series of the most direful objects, assassinations, rebellions, anarchy, tyranny, and religion itself, either cruel, or gloomy and unsocial. An historian who would paint it in its true colours must take the pencil of Guercino or Salvator Rosa.
The Academia delle Scienze, in the Piazza Carignano, should not be missed, as it contains a very interesting Museum of natural history; Egyptian, Grecian, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities; and a fine gallery of paintings, including some of the best works of Vandyke, Raphael, Paul Veronese, Guido, Titian, Rembrandt, Guercino, Carlo Dolci, and other of the great masters.
When the latter came back, his friend was sitting with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. Rowland, in the geniality of a mood attuned to the mellow charm of a Roman villa, found a good word to say for the Guercino; but he chiefly talked of the view from the little belvedere on the roof of the casino, and how it looked like the prospect from a castle turret in a fairy tale.
There are English houses enough in wondrous parks, but they expose you to too many small needs and observances to say nothing of a red-faced butler dropping his h's. You are oppressed with the detail of accommodation. Here the billiard-table is old-fashioned, perhaps a trifle crooked; but you have Guercino above your head, and Guercino, after all, is almost as good as Guido.
The gallery is, consequently, one of the richest second-rate galleries in Italy, and one may spend much longer time in it than we gave, with great profit. There are some most interesting heads of Christ, painted, as Guercino always painted the Saviour, with a great degree of humanity in the face.
This may be possible, as George IV. said a woman never reaches her highest powers of fascination till she is forty. Guido was her instructor, and one of her warmest eulogizers. She was an intimate friend of Domenichino and of Guercino, who gave all his wealth to philanthropies, and when in England was the warm friend of Vandyck.
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