Giovanni Francesco Barbieri GUERCINO

Drawn with the point of the brush and modelled almost entirely in wash, this fine study of an armoured warrior cannot be definitively associated with any of Guercino’s surviving paintings. Nevertheless, similar helmeted soldiers appear in a number of the artist’s works. More specifically, the figure in this drawing may have been intended to depict Mars, as the facial type, armour and plumed helmet are all motifs common to the depiction of the god in several paintings by Guercino. The appearance of the figure in this drawing is particularly close, for example, to two paintings of Mars alone, one of c.1628 at Tatton Park in Cheshire and the other, datable to 1630, at Apsley House in London, as well as a Mars, Venus and Cupid of 1633 in the Galleria Estense in Modena and a Mars Seated with a Putto of 1649 in the Cincinnati Art Museum in Ohio. 

Another possible identification of the subject would be the Circassian warrior Argantes, the fiercest of the pagan knights from Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme liberata, of whom Guercino produced a finished pen and wash drawing and a related painting of c.1645, known in two versions; one in the Uffizi in Florence and the other in a private collection. As Nicholas Turner has noted, ‘Argantes is generally identified by the adundant plumes of his helmet, sometimes construed as a metaphor for his unrestrained ferocity.’ However, it may be noted that the face of the subject in this drawing bears little trace of the aggressive character attributed to Argantes.

Drawings executed almost entirely with the brush, with only a limited use of the pen, are quite rare in Guercino’s oeuvre. Among stylistically comparable examples is a Bust of a Bearded Man in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and a brush drawing of A Warrior with a Plumed Helmet in Profile to the Right in a private British collection. Two further drawings of this type are a study of a soldier with a sword in the Courtauld Gallery in London, which is related to a figure in Guercino’s Hersilia Intervening Between Romulus and Tatius of 1645 in the Louvre, and a drawing of a Mucius Scaevolain the Princeton University Art Museum, which is a study for a painting of Mucius Scaevola Before Lars Porsenna of c.1645-1648, now in the Palazzo Durazzo-Pallavicini in Genoa. 

Drawings such as this may have been made to serve as stock figure types and models, to be kept in the studio and used as needed for staffage in paintings or engravings. A very similar frontal view of a man in a plumed helmet, but drawn in red chalk, appeared at auction in New York in 1998 and was formerly in a private collection in Chicago. 

The present sheet is part of a small but choice group of Guercino drawings acquired by the soldier, politician and collector Sir Charles Greville (1762-1832), although it remains unclear how, when and from whom he acquired them. Greville’s collection passed by descent to his nephew, George Guy Greville, 4th Earl of Warwick (1818-1893) and was kept at Warwick Castle, on the River Avon in Warwickshire. A dozen Guercino drawings from the Warwick Castle collection are today in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.