(Cento 1591–1666 Bologna) Rinaldo Restraining Armida from Wounding Herself with an Arrow, 1664 Oil on canvas, 113, 5 x 153,5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Ugucione (Odoccione) Pepoli, 1664;
Collection of Girolamo Manfrin, Venice, circa 1795 – 1897;
sale with Giulio Sambone, Milan 1897;
European private collection;

Literature: G. Nicoletti, Pinacoteca Manfrin a Venezia, Venice 1872, p. 23, n. 103 (as Guercino); Catalogo della Galleria Manfrin. Quadri di celebri autori italiani e olandesi, Milan 1897, p. 27 n. 38 (Sale Giulio Sambon, Milan, as Guercino); B. Ghelfi, Il libro dei conti del Guercino, 1629–1666, Bologna 1997, p. 197, no. 587. We are greatful to Professor Nicolas Turner for fully endorsing the attribution to Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, il Guercino.

This beautiful, newly discovered, half-length painting by Guercino depicts Rinaldo preventing Armida from committing suicide by thrusting one of her arrows into her body. It is the last recorded painting of a secular subject painted by Guercino and, as such, is a highly important addition to his oeuvre. The lovers Rinaldo and Armida are the central characters in the Italian epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata, by Torquato Tasso (1544–1595), an idealized account of the first Crusade. Rinaldo is a Christian prince, while Armida a beautiful sorceress sent by Satan, in league with the Saracens, to undo the crusaders’ plans through witchcraft. The canvas concludes Guercino’s long and fruitful activity as a painter of secular stories, one that had started nearly fifty years before, in 1615–17, with his fresco decorations of the Casa Pannini, a small country villa outside Cento. Coincidentally, one of the rooms of the Casa Pannini showed the Stories of Rinaldo and Armida, with the penultimate scene representing Rinaldo Restraining Armida, the very same subject as the present picture (1). This sequence of panels, now detached, they are all now in the Pinacoteca Civica, Cento. The newly-discovered Rinaldo Restraining Armida is mentioned in Guercino’s Account Book, on 24th October,1664, as follows: ‘Dal Ill: mo Sig: r Co: odoccione Peppoli si e auto per il quadro di Rinaldo e Armida Ducatoni Cento. Che fanno L 500 - che sono Scudi 125’(2). At about the same time, Count Pepoli had ordered a painting of ‘puttini’, which explains another possible citation of Guercino’s picture by the artist’s biographer, Conte Carlo Cesare Malvasia, under the year 1664. Malvasia reports the artist’s undertaking to paint: ‘Diverse figure per li signori Pepoli, e mezze figure, e puttini’, which may therefore include the Rinaldo and Armida (3).

The painting has been long considered lost and its reappearance is of great interest to our understanding of the style of Guercino’s very last years. So precise in its draughtsmanship is the Rinaldo Restraining Armida and so well controlled in its pictorial handling that it is hard to believe that the artist was 73years of age when he painted it. In spite of his advanced years and in spite of having suffered a very severe illness some three years before, which, according to Malvasia, he very nearly did not survive, the quality of this new canvas is as high as the very best of Guercino’s late works (4). In terms of figurative conception, colour, lighting and overall handling, the painting that comes closest to it in execution is his great altarpiece of St Thomas Aquinas, painted in 1662–63 for S. Domenico, Bologna, and still in situ (5). Here, some interesting analogies to the Rinaldo Restraining Armida may be found, for example, in the angle of the head of St Dominic and in the expression of his face and that of the head of Armida herself. Also, some of the accompanying angels in the St Thomas have slightly flaccid, elongated limbs like Armida’s long, outstretched arms. In both canvases, the drapery folds are not as cavernous as in the often dramatically lit garments worn by the figures in Guercino’s paintings of the 1630s and ‘40s, but are instead slightly flattened and simplified into almost abstract patterns. The Rinaldo Restraining Armida was conceived as a gallery picture and was intended to feast the eye. In contrast to the evenly lit surfaces and muted pastel shades of so many of Guercino’s late religious pictures, the drama of Armida’s attempted suicide is reinforced by the sombre background. By concealing the expression of Rinaldo’s eyes with the shadow cast by the peak of his helmet, the viewer is forced to contemplate Armida’s agonized face, her pallid figure thrown forward by the construction of the composition as well as by the surrounding darks. But a particularly welcome surprise of the new picture is the extent of the bravura passages in certain details. For example, Guercino triumphs superbly over such pictorial challenges as Rinaldo’s shiny plumed helmet and Armida’s abandoned weaponry, including her quiver of arrows (though apparently no bow), her sword and armour, all of it piled up together into a trophy-ofarms, as it were, in the bottom right of the canvas. As already mentioned, one of the rooms of the Casa Pannini, the Camera della Venere, was originally decorated with nine frescoes of the Stories of Rinaldo and Armida, now in the Pinacoteca Civica, Cento. In Guercino’s ex-Casa Pannini panel of Rinaldo Restraining Armida, the two protagonists appear full length in an open landscape, with Rinaldo neutralizing Armida’s selfdestructive act by approaching her from behind and holding her right forearm with his right hand.

Her quiver of arrows and bow are cast to the ground at her feet. In the new picture, however, Rinaldo stands to one side of Armida as he thwarts her bitter intentions. But in spite of these differences between the two treatments of the subject, which, let’s remember, are separated by almost fifty years, there are some interesting similarities, especially in both the pose and lighting of Armida. In the early fresco, she also tilts her head a little coquettishly to the right, and holds out her arms to the side as if taking wing. Even her dress is similar, with its high waistline, tied around with a sash. Also akin to the body of her much later counterpart is the fact that she, too, is lit from the left, so that the right side of her face and body fall in shadow. Two preparatory drawings by Guercino for the late Rinaldo Restraining Armida composition survive, the first much more obviously connected with the new painting than the second. The first, in pen and ink, is in the Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford (Fig. 2), and was first connected with the school variant, in the Palazzo Montecitorio, Rome (on deposit at the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples), based on Guercino’s still lost painting by Denis Mahon, Massimo Pulini, and others (6). It is typical of Guercino’s fiery, rapidly-drawn pen studies from his late period. Interestingly, the Christ Church drawing shows the figures almost full length, with the upper half of Armida’s body bare, implying that at first Pepoli may have wanted Guercino to paint him a whole-length canvas, but this request was perhaps then declined by the master on the grounds of ill-health. As in the finished, painted result, Rinaldo stands next to Armida, in the same plane, almost as if in a dance, and he restrains Armida’s impetuous attempt to harm herself, and, significantly, he does so with both arms, as in the painting. Naturally, the halting of her action is a climax in the poem, for ‘già la fera punta al petto stende‘. Although undoubtedly by Guercino, a direct connection with the new painting of a second drawing, in red chalk, in the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan (Fig. 1), which was first identified as a study for the lost picture by Denis Mahon and Prisco Bagni, is less clear cut (7). In the Brera drawing, Rinaldo holds Armida’s forearm with only one hand, with his forearm beneath rather than above that of Armida, while Armida crooks her left arm by resting it on her waist, rather than gesturing back with her left hand to the weaponry behind her. Both these features appear in the Rome painting, which must have come into existence under Guercino’s supervision very likely at the same time as the master was carrying out his own canvas of the subject.

We are greatful to Professor Nicolas Turner for his help in cataloguing the present painting.

Provenance: In 1664 Ugucione (Odoccione) Pepoli paid Guercino for a painting of Rinaldo and Armida (Guercino account book, 24th October 1664 ‘Dal Ill: mo Sig: r Co: Odoccione Peppoli si e auto per il quadro di Rinaldo e Armida Ducatoni Cento. Che fanno L 500 - che sono Scudi 125’) and probably remained in Bologna until it was purchased by Girolamo Manfrin in the late 18th Century. Between circa 1795 and 1897 the painting was in the Manfrin Collection, Venice (the collector’s mark was on the reverse of the relined canvas) between circa 1795 and 1897. Girolamo Manfrin (Zara, 1742 -Venezia, 1801) bought the painting in Bologna before 1801 (the year of his death) but certainly after 1794, as the painting does not appear in 1794 catalogue of the collection. It is known from written correspondence that Girolamo Manfrin was in contact with the Bolognese art dealer Giovanni Maria Sasso (1735 ca - 1803) who advised on paintings that could be acquired from Bolognese private collections. The present painting is included in the 1872 inventory of the collection by Nicoletti and is described as ‘Gio. Francesco Barbieri, detto il Guercino da Cento: Rinaldo che trattiene il braccio ad Armida, mentre questa sta per trafiggersi il seno denudato con un dardo. Mezze figure grandi al vero’. The celebrated Manfrin collection was in Palazzo Priuli Manfrin in Cannaregio, Venice and contained masterworks by Titian, Giorgione, Jacopo Bassano and Tintoretto. Girolamo Manfrin was described by an art dealer, Giovanni Antonio Armano, as ‘l’unico che spenda in belle arti a Venezia’, particulary interested in art (8). Manfrin made his fortune trading tobacco and was created a Marquis by Pius VII in 1801. In 1788 he bought the Venetian palace of the Priuli family to house his growing art collection and created a gallery that Moschini describes in 1806 as:’dè più sperti pennelli, incominciando dà pittori primi ed a nostri giorni discendendo; ed era di lui pensiero, se la morte non lo avesse troppo presto mietuto, di offerire di mano in mano tele de diversi tempi e delle diverse scuole, perchè vi si potessero a un colpo d’occhio riconoscere gli scapiti e i vantaggi, che nelle varie età, ebbe quest’arte’ (9). In 1897 the art dealer Giulio Sambon organized an auction in Milan to sell part of the Manfrin Collection. The painting is included in the catalogue of the sale as Guercino ‘Rinaldo trattiene il braccio ad Armida mentre questa sta per trafiggersi con un dardo’ (10).

Fußnoten/Footnotes: (1) P. Bagni, Guercino a Cento, Le decorazioni di Casa Pannini, Bologna, 1984, p. 164, fig. 129. For a general discussion of the decoration of this room, see pp. 141 ff. (2) B. Ghelfi, Il libro dei conti del Guercino, 1629–1666, Bologna, 1997, p. 197, no. 587. (3) C. C. Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice, Vite dei Pittori Bolognesi, Bologna, 1841, II, p. 272. (4) Malvasia, 1841, II, p. 271mentions that, in November, 1661, the painter: ‘fu sovrapreso da un grandissimo mal di punta, che stette quasi per morire, ma con l’aiuto di molte cavate di sangue si riebbeö (5) L. Salerno, I dipinti del Guercino, Rome, 1988, p. 402, no. 342. (6) Oxford: Christ Church Picture Gallery: inv. no. 0578; pen and brown ink. 235 x 192 (J. Byam Shaw, Drawings by Old Masters at Christ Church, Oxford, Oxford, 1976, I, p. 261, repr. II, fig. 602). See also D. Mahon, a cura di, Guercino, Poesia e Sentimento nella Pittura del ‘600, exh. cat., Palazzo Reale, Milan, September, 2003 to January, 2004, p. 236, under no. 78. (7) P. Bagni, Disegni emiliani dei secoli XVII - XVIII della Pinacoteca di Brera, a cura di Daniele Pescarmona, Milan 1995, no. 24, p. 109, inv. no.15; red chalk; 200 x 245 mm. (8) L. Borean, Il caso Manfrin in Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia. Il Settecento, a cura di L. Borean e S. Mason, Venezia 2009, pp. 193–216. (9) G. Moschini, Della letteratura veneziana del secolo XVIII fino ai nostri giorni, Venezia 1806–1808, vol. 2, 1806, p. 107. (10) Catalogo della Galleria Manfrin. Quadri di celebri autori italiani e olandesi, Milano 1897 (Sale Giulio Sambon, Milan, as Guercino), p. 27 n. 38.

Provenance: Ugucione (Odoccione) Pepoli, 1664; Collection of Girolamo Manfrin, Venice, circa 1795 – 1897; sale with Giulio Sambone, Milan 1897; European private collection; Literature: G. Nicoletti, Pinacoteca Manfrin a Venezia, Venice 1872, p. 23, n. 1