Seductive, strong and suave: the appearance of Christ to his mother by Guercino

It bears the date of October 17, 1786, Johann Wolfang Goethe’s visit to Cento, appropriately and extensively noted in his Italienische Reise. The great man of letters, having arrived in this industrious strip of the Po Valley on a mild autumn evening veiled in harmless clouds, had found there a pleasant, clean, lively town, immersed in a fertile land, and especially had found there the home of Guercino: a name that in Cento, Goethe noted, ran on the lips of everyone, young and old, like that of a saint. And of that artist so “profoundly and manly experienced, wholesome, without rawness,” as Goethe described him, with the adjectives quoted here from Eugenio Zaniboni’s translation of Viaggio in Italia , the writer had especially appreciated one of those works that have “gentle and honest grace, a freedom and grandeur equal to composure, and then that peculiar character, which makes us recognize them at first sight, once the eye has been trained.”

It was the risen Christ appearing to his mother: Goethe had seen it in the place for which it was painted, the oratory of the Company of the Most Holy Name of God, while today we admire it in the rooms of the Civic Art Gallery. In between, a not-so-quiet story: on July 6, 1796, upon the arrival in the city of the two Napoleonic commissioners whom the local scholar Gaetano Atti mentions in the Sunto storico della città di Cento as “Ciney” and “Berthollet” (most likely the painters Jacques-Pierre Tinet and Jean-Simon Barthélemy), the painting was plundered along with others that adorned churches in the hometown of the great Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, to be transferred to France. It arrived in Paris on July 31 of the following year, and from 1798 it was exhibited in the Louvre: only in 1816, with the Restoration, was the painting allowed to return to Cento, and was first placed in the oratory of San Rocco, and then found its final location, in 1839, in the Pinacoteca Civica, which opened to the public that year.

So many adjectives have been spent to describe this painting so touching, so intense, so heartfelt. Guercino narrates there the apparition of Christ to the Virgin, immediately after the Resurrection, in an episode that does not appear in the canonical gospels, but which can be read in an apocrypha, the Gospel of Gamaliel, and which gained some credence among the theologians of the Middle Ages: Jesus is painted with the customary crucified banner, the iconographic attribute of medieval origin, a symbol of victory, identifying him as the one who triumphed over death. He is caught in a most elegant and classical juxtaposition, wrapped in the breezy mantle that is moved by the same breeze that causes the banner to flutter and dishevels the book the very young Virgin was reading. She kneels down, throws herself on the sculptural and monumental body of her son, with her right hand caresses his turned and wounded abdomen, runs her tapering fingers over the pearly skin of Jesus, and he reciprocates the gesture by affectionately embracing his mother, standing before her. Mary betrays no emotion: her gaze is trepid and filled with deep melancholy, her eyes swollen and moist, her mouth opens in an anguished grimace. He looks at her seriously and compassionately, his eyes downcast and fixed on her, his face almost imperturbable, but equally veiled with sadness: the attitude and pose are those of the son of God who sacrificed himself for mankind, but the gesture of the left hand, the gentle caress that touches the shoulders of the mother with delicate, almost adolescent features, and the gloom that overshadows the face, are those of the son who reciprocates his mother’s love moved and who does not fail to show his mother his filial pietas .

Guercino, Risen Christ Appears to the Mother (1628-1630; oil on canvas, 260 Ã? 179.5 cm; Cento, Pinacoteca Civica)

Goethe was intimately struck by the intensity of the moment depicted by Guercino, by Christ’s pose “beyond all telling seductive,” by that exchange of glances between Jesus and his mother, so vivid, poignant and palpitating: “The mute and sorrowful gaze, with which he contemplates her, is unique: as if the memory of his and her sorrows, not yet healed by the resurrection, nevertheless hovers before that noble spirit.” Other commentators were enraptured by the colors, the contrasts of light and shadow, and the vigor of Guercino’s stain: Francesco Algarotti, who spoke of it in a letter written on September 27, 1760 to the engineer Eustachio Zanotti, described it as a “beautiful painting,” supported by a “most sought-after” drawing, the “suavity” and the “strength” of the hues, asserting that he had “never seen two figures better camped out in a picture,” and where “that strength of light, which gives such prominence to objects, accords wonderfully with the truth.” The “great contrast of light and shadow, the one and the other boldly galliard, but mixed with great sweetness for union, and great artifice for relief,” was also admired by Abbot Luigi Lanzi, who included the painting in his Storia pittorica dell’Italia dal Risorgimento delle belle arti fin presso al fine del XVIII secolo, published in 1796. And among the most recent enthusiasms is that of the great Guercino scholar, Denis Mahon, who in the Risen Christ Appearing to His Mother read the beginnings of the Cento painter’s most “classical” phase, marked by a marked tension towards theidealization and simplification that came to him from “an almost complete acceptance,” Mahon wrote, “of the rules of classical theory,” and then from more monumental figures, from a more measured natural.

The painting, we know from the artist’s Account Book , was finished in the year 1630, in a period from which the prodromes of his rapprochement with Guido Reni could be traced: a subject on which scholars have long debated. And it was precisely during this turn of time, and more precisely on July 23, 1629, that Cardinal Bernardino Spada, papal legate in Bologna, visited Guercino’s studio, recommending the painter to Maria de’ Medici for the frescoes in the Palais de Luxembourg in place of Reni himself, since, the prelate wrote, “Guercino da Cento [...] appresso Guido è grandemente simato et adoprato in Italia” and "for being of a fresher age and of a more assiduous nature at work, he could not only resist the grandeur of the work desired by V.M., but also send it much sooner; and for having a vigorous drawing and a coloring of great strength and vividness, he is judged by everyone, and by Guido himself, to be very apt for representations of battles and great and majestic actions. Spada had well grasped the difference that separated Guercino from Guido Reni: no matter how close Barbieri had come to the Bolognese master, no matter how much his figures had acquired an unusual statuesque dimension, no matter how much even the poses tended to turn out to be much more constructed than was usual for him, never did his works reach the degree of abstraction to which Reni was able to push himself.

His art did not give in to the temptation to imitate the ancient, and at the same time remained firmly linked to the real, the veridical: that “human element” which, for Mahon, had gradually abandoned Guido Reni’s art, in Guercino still remained a firmly distinguishing element. Daniele Benati has well pointed out how there appears nothing Reni-like in the “meager ’stage’ props adopted to adjure the tale”: the blushing of the Virgin’s hands and face and the physical prowess of Jesus pertain to the world of the real, almost of the popular. And the same can probably be said of the sincerity of the affections, the engaging truth of the gestures, that “theater of feelings” that Benati himself wrote about at length to refer to Guercino’s art, so much so that he tacked on a very significant portion of the great 2017 exhibition at Palazzo Farnese in Piacenza. A theater, the Emilian art historian recalled, “in which the action, stopped at its climax, can be effused into pure sentiment, as was the case in the coeval melodrama, capable of restoring even the most extreme passions but at the same time diluting them in moments of moving beauty.” A theater that, in this painting, also takes on concrete evidence with the large curtain drawn aside, almost as if it were a curtain, in the right corner of the composition. A theater that perhaps finds in the masterpiece of the Pinacoteca di Cento its most divine expression.

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