(Cento 1591–1666 Bologna)
The Death of Adonis,
oil on unlined canvas, 68.5 x 105.5 cm, framed

We are extremely grateful to Nicholas Turner for suggesting the attribution of the present painting after examination in the original. He believes this newly-discovered canvas of the Death of Adonis by the young Guercino to be the most important addition made in recent years to his earliest period, from which relatively few paintings and drawings have survived.

We are also grateful to Erich Schleier for confirming the attribution after seeing the painting in the original. Schleier fully agrees with Turner regarding the dating of the painting 1613–1615, and he believes the painting to be a masterpiece of the early production of the artist.

Very little is known of Guercino’s output before 1612, the year in which he was “discovered” by Padre Antonio Mirandola, Canon of San Salvatore in Bologna and later President of the Monastery of Santo Spirito in Cento. From its style, the present canvas is datable to about 1613-15 and appears to be Guercino’s first gallery picture of a mythological subject, preceding by three years his Women Bathing (Diana and Actaeon?), in the Boyman-van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, generally dated 1618, which is often categorized as a landscape rather than a history subject1. This Death of Adonis is therefore of considerable interest in furthering an understanding of Guercinos’ career at its outset. Despite the differences in size and date between the present picture and that in Rotterdam, they share a number of common features. One is the down-to-earth simplicity in the representation of the countryside and the life within it – both human and animal. Another is the eye-catching presence in the foreground of a female nude, seen from the rear – Venus in the one and a nymph of Diana in the another – the physique of both women being more suggestive of the healthy, local girls of Cento then any ancient marble statue of an idealized female figure (2).

A precocious date in Guercino’s stylistic development for this picture is reinforced by some formal analogies with passages from his first altarpiece, The Triumph of All Saints, painted in 1613 for the Church of Santo Spirito in Cento (3). The picture is now lost, but its appearance survives in a painted copy, formerly Bridgewater House, London, also no longer existant but known from photographs, as well as from Guercino’s own finished compositional study in the Louvre (4).
Venus’s profile profil perdu in the Death of Adonis is anticipated by that of the Madonna in the lost Cento altarpiece, her head turned inwards as she kneels before Christ who presents her to the heavenly congregation kneeling before them. Secondly, the white cloth billowing out in the arabesque from behind Venus’s voluptuous body, the other end which she uses to wipe away her tears, finds a parallel in the extravagant curlicue of Christ’s drapery fluttering out from behind him as if in a heavenly gale. A particularly good example of such facture may be found in the face and hair of the red-headed putto, who cries uncontrollably. His finger tightly intertwines as he presses his hands hard against his face to stem the flow of tears.

Relative to the overall picture space, the figures of the Death of Adonis are small, a diminutive scale enhanced by the reduced size of most of the participants – the four attendant putti, Adonis’s two dogs and the pair of white doves, which have brought their mistress by chariot to the scene of the tragedy. In the small size of the figures, the Death of Adonis is typical of Guercino’s oeuvre of this date. In many of his earliest compositions, the figures are intentionally small in order to give grandeur to their setting, as can be seen in the scenes from his decorations of the Casa Panini (1615-17) (5). Venus, the most striking protagonist in the present picture, still does not determine the composition in the way that Guercino’s principal figures were shortly to do in so many of the subsequent history subjects.

Already evident in Guercino’s Death of Adonis is a highly personal feature of his working method, his habit of adjusting the contours of his figures, as well as other elements of the design, as the execution of painting progressed and then patching them over later, without always fully concealing his earlier thoughts. The most striking instance of such a modification in the present canvas is the figure of Venus, which was originally slightly further over to the right, but was then shifted, more to the left (6). Remnants of Venus’s previous location are mostly painted over, but nevertheless show through the paint that was applied to conceal them (more so with the passage of time). Even in her new position, Guercino continued subtly to re-align her limbs, as can be seen from the cleverly disguised corrections and variable paint thickness near the contours. Guercino’s habit of making far-reaching pentiments as his work progressed is a hallmark of his creative process and was to remain constant throughout his life, especially in his drawings.

Ferrarese influences dominate Guercino’s Death of Adonis, perhaps more so even than the elegant figure style of Ludovico Carracci (1555–1619), with whose work the young painter came into contact from the start of his activity. Hints of the impact on Guercino of the local school of painting in Ferrara are to be seen in certain landscape details and in the choice of colour – with saturated greens and blues significantly outplaying the more sparing passages of warm reds and earths. One such “stage prop” is the orange-tree to the right of centre, laden with brightly coloured fruit, that recalls the similar citrus fruit trees found in the work of the city’s principal Renaissance master, Dosso Dossi (c. 1492? – 1547) (7). Reminiscent of Dosso, too, is Guercino’s compositional orchestration, with the orange-tree towering above Adonis’s mourners and dividing the picture space into two, unequal sections. Pentiments for the branches of another, tall tree, situated on the far left, are still visible beneath the sky, Guercino having wisely decided that a further vertical element to that side of the composition was unnecessary.

From the work of another, later Ferrarese master Ippolito Scarsellino (1551 – 1620), Guercino’s older contemporary, come other distinctive features found within the picture, for example the treatment of the landscape, especially in the background to the left, with open terrain leading to distant mountains. This space is articulated by dark greens, cool greys and blues and is animated occasionally by figures or buildings, very much in the manner of Scarsellino’s landscape backgrounds. Also reminiscent of Scarsellino is the cloud-streaked sky to the left, with vestiges of sunlight at the horizon, although the light in which Guercino’s figures are bathed in fact comes from in front of them, slightly to the left. Scarsellino was, moreover, popular for his paintings of the female nude, a particularly fine example of which is his Bathers, circa 1600, in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, in which slender, bare-fleshed young women move graciously as they bathe or dry themselves at the water’s edge, some with plaited hair gathered atop their heads, decorated with beads and ribbons8. Counterparts to Guercino’s Venus, with her beautiful hair-do, are often found among the figures in Scarsellino’s paintings, especially the Bathers, for example that seen from the rear, with her head half turned away, second from left. Guercino’s sensitive but uncompromising representation of Venus’s naked body is a far cry from the older painter’s more idealized but slightly monotonous female nudes.

The story of Adonis, the beautiful young hunter tragically killed by a wild boar, fascinated the cultured classes in Italy, in the first quarter of seventeenth century, culminating in cavaliere Giovanni Battista Marino’s poem Adone, published in Paris in 1623 and dedicated to the poet’s protector, Maria de’ Medici. Among the many sub-themes of this complex text was the love of Adonis’s dogs for their dashing and adventurous master (and not simply Adonis’s love for his dog). The idea of pointing out the sorrow of these animals for their deceased master and therefore their affection for him is humorously anticipated in Guercino’s picture, where the two putti on the right console Adonis’s greyhound, as Venus and two more putti in the centre mourn Adonis himself.

While Guercino’s Death of Adonis reflects the popularity of the myth in the early seventeenth century, its conception shows knowledge of two earlier representations of the subject, both by Bolognese painters, which must have been well known at the time. The fresco by Domenichino (1581 – 1641), painted in 1603-4 in the Loggia del Giardino of the Palazzo Farnese, Rome, now in the Palazzo Farnese itself, is the first (9). The mastiff in the centre of Domenichino’s fresco, seated on the ground close to his master’s corpse and looking up in surprise at Venus’s hysterical inrush, prefigures the brindled hound in Guercino’s painting, except here his head hangs down disconsolately (10). Domenichino’s presentation of Adonis’s body, in the centre foreground, with his head lolling back sharply, his face in steep foreshortening and the wound in the side of his body in much the same relative position, has analogies with Guercino’s figure of the corpse, except in reverse.

The second treatment of the Death of Adonis subject, painted very likely just a few years later than Domenichino’s, is a lost canvas by Albani (1578–1661), the appearance of which is known from a pen-and-wash drawing in the British Museum (fig.1) (11). Formerly thought to date towards the end of painter’s career, it was rather made at the beginning of his Roman period (1601-17), on account of its resemblance in style to the late drawings of his erstwhile master Annibale Carracci (1560-1609). In compositional structure, figural inter-relationships and landscape setting, Albani’s arrangement of the scene does find some echoes in Guercino’s canvas: Albani’s nude Venus is similarly the most prominent figure in the scene; the mourning putto in the centre, his arms wide open in grief, recalls the one in the middle of Guercino’s picture, standing over Adonis’s corpse; and the tree on the far left that closes off the composition on that side is in the same relative position as the one covered over with sky in Guercino canvas.

Guercino’s Death of Adonis is the last in a trio of compositions by three Bolognese painter of the same generation, all of them Carracci trained. In Guercino’s concluding piece, a lighter, more bucolic flavor is substituted for the more orthodox approach of the other two. That Guercino at such an early stage of his career was au courant with current developments in painting in both Bologna and Rome should not come as a surprise, nor should the wide spread dissemination of visual records of important painted compositions by the leading artists of the day. Before he was twenty-years-old, Guercino must have known of the principle artistic developments in nearby Bologna. Around 1610, following his early apprenticeship in Cento under Benedetto Gennari Senior, he moved to Bologna itself, where he trained with Giovanni Battista Cremonini, staying there for some time (12). During this period he became familiar with the work of Ludovico Carracci, whose style was such an important formative influence on his early painting. Once more back in Cento (certainly by 1612, if not before), he would have made occasional visits Bologna, the two centres being only some 20 miles (33 kms) apart, and he may even have met Domenichino himself when the latter stayed in the city in that year (13).

The patron who commissioned Guercino to paint the Death of Adonis remains unknown, the work having been carried out some fifteen before the start of the artist’s Account Book (14). At first sight, the two ears of barley on the far right of the composition, behind the pair of putti comforting Adonis’s greyhound, might seem to be heraldic attributes. But along with the bunches of grapes and the plethora of oranges they are more likely to be symbols of earth’s newfound fertility, resulting from Adonis’s split blood (15). A possible allusion to the patron is the unusual species of dove harnessed to Venus’s chariot. By paying amorous attention to each other and ignoring their mistress’s grief, the pair add some humor to the bleak spectacle, as well as illustrating that love itself does not die. The bizarrely feathered legs on the male bird are characteristic of the plumage of the white Uzbek tumbler pigeon, a breed known in Uzbekistan, Armenia and Russia, specimens of which must have been rare in Italy in the seventeenth century (16). At least one pair was known to Guercino’s patron or to the painter himself.

Guercinos’s prodigious gifts as a painter manifested themselves from the start of his career, as was already widely recognized in his own day, above all by his early sponsor Padre della Mirandola. This newly-discovered Death of Adonis demonstrates that extraordinary talent in all its fullness, in the painter’s perceptive observation of human action, the breadth of his creative imagination and the sheer brilliance of his handling. Given the exceptional rarity of works on canvas from the outset of his career, the importance of this picture cannot be underestimated. Not only does it reveal the young master’s extraordinary technical competence at an early age but it also shows the subtlety of his invention. Finally, it is testimony to his courage: working in Cento, a rural backwater outside Bologna, he was prepared to take on the best artists of the day in the painting of history subjects, the most challenging of all fields, dazzling the competition by the brilliance of his handling and the wit of a story-telling.

Guercino, nearly 35 years after painting the present picture, referred back to its composition when planning the only other treatment of the subject that he painted during the whole of the rest of his career, the great canvas formerly in the Staatliche Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, which Cardinal Mazarin commissioned him to paint in 1646, but was destroyed in the second world war (fig.2) (see L. Salerno, I Dipinti del Guercino, 1988, p. 311, no. 237, ill.).
This evidence takes the form of an engraving by Tommaso Piroli (1752–1824), who was active in Paris early in the 19th century, after a finished drawing by Guercino, now apparently lost (fig.3). The drawing anticipates a number of motifs in the Mazarin picture, including the body of Venus, half turned to the left, rushing towards the corpse of Adonis, her arms out-flung in extravagant grief; the criss-cross tree-trunks that grow from the rocky bank in the left background; and the nude cupid to the left of the composition tugging strenuously at the broken branch of a tree-trunk in the lost drawing and, in the now destroyed picture, formerly in Dresden, at the left ear of the boar that had killed Adonis.

In the drawing recorded in Piroli’s print, there are just as many recollections of ideas that Guercino first formulated in his early Venus and Adonis as presentiments of the composition of the lost Dresden picture. Chief among these is the much smaller scale of the figures in relation to the overall picture space and the unusually large number of accompanying putti, whose secondary actions emphasize different aspects of the central drama as Venus discovers the body of her dead lover. This almost playful “spin” given to the ostensibly tragic mythological subject again recalls Guercino’s reference to Albani’s painted mythologies; and it was, indeed, a now lost painting by Albani that was so important an inspiration to the young Guercino all those years before. Among a number of details from Guercino’s early painting recycled in the lost drawing recorded by Piroli are Adonis’s body lying in the centre foreground, close to the base of the composition and almost parallel to it, his head to the right and his feet to the left; the inclusion of Venus’s vehicle (omitted from the Dresden picture), a two-wheeler parked on the ground, to the left, in the early canvas, as the two doves that have powered it fondly pecking at each other, and a four-wheeler, air-borne, towed by a pair of swans in the lost drawing for the Mazarin composition; and finally, the many affinities in pose and expression between the grief stricken putti that attend the scene in both representations. More than other painters of his time, Guercino looked back to his own previous work when seeking ideas for a new invention. Modifying a figural pose he had already used before saved him time on a commission. He could easily remind himself of the figures from a previous composition, even one from decades before, by referring to the many hundreds of preparatory drawings he had made in years gone by, which he jealously preserved as a resource for precisely this purpose. In making these self-borrowings, he often disguised as much as possible the figure or figures from his own previous work that had been his source, sometimes reversing them, switching their sex, or varying their draperies, and so on. Both the common denominators and the variations between the composition of present early canvas of Venus and Adonis and that of Guercino’s later drawing recorded in Piroli’s print, according to Turner, indicate the presence of Guercino’s creative imagination in both.


(1) Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen: inv 2009; oil on canvas; 36.5 x 53.5 cm (most recently, S. Loire, Nature et ideal. Le paysage à Rome, 1600 – 1650, exh.cat., Gran Palais, Galeries nationales, Paris, March to June, 2011, pp. 142-3, no. 31, with entry by Sylvia Ginzburg.

(2) An even more uncompromisingly realistic representation of the nude figure, perhaps closer to the Venus here, is found in the red chalk preparatory study for the Rotterdam picture in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle (inv. no. 2353; 224 x 193 mm; D. Mahon and N. Turner, The Drawings of Guercino in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, Cambridge, 1989, p.4, no. 7). A number of features of Guercino’s Venus in the present canvas-notably her robust body and braided hair, decorated with beads-recur in his later fresco Venus Suckling Cupid, of 1615-17, in the Casa Panini Cento, where she lies on her side on the ground feeding her infant (L. Salerno, I dipinti del Guercino, Rome, 1988, p. 107, under no. 24).

(3) C.C. Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice, Bologna (ed. 1841), II, p. 258. it was through Padre Mirandola that Guercino received this important commission from Don Biagio Bagni, later Generale de’ Canonici Regolare.

(4) A photo of the Bridgewater House copy after Guercino’s All Saints is reproduced by Salerno, 1988, p. 84, no. 3 Guercino’s compositional study in the Louvre is there illustrated alongside. Insofar that one is able to judge them, the tautly rendered facial features of the saints in the heavenly chorus in the lost altarpiece recall the linear modeling of Adoni’s death mask. Further stylistic analogies may also be found in some of the draperies in the St. Charles Borromeo in Prayer, datable 1613 or 1614, in the Collegiata di S. Biagio, Cento (Salerno, 1988, p. 85, no. 4).

(5) For the Casa Panini frescoes, see P. Bagni, Guercino a Cento, le decorazioni di Casa Panini, Bologna, 1984, passim, and Salerno, 1988, pp. 102-107, no. 24.

(6) Many of these adjustaments to the contours within the composition may be discerned from the infra-red reflectograph of the painting.

(7) A distinctive example of such a tree is the lemon-tree in Dosso Dossi’s Allegory with Pan in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, formerly in the collection of the Earl of Northampton at Castle Ashby, Northants (inv. no. 83. PA. 15, oil on canvas, 163.8 x 145.4 cm; P- Humfrey and M. Lucco, Dosso Dossi, Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara, exh.cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1998, pp. 203-9, n°38.

(8) M.A. Novelli, Scarsellino, Milan, 2008, p. 307, cat. no. 102, repr. Pp. 130-131.

(9) R. Spear, Domenichino, New Haven and London, 1982 (2 vols), pp. 132-133, no. 10.iii, pl. 13.

(10) The breed of dog in Guercino’s early picture is exactly that of the that of the Aldovrandi mastiff in Guercino’s famous Portrait of a Dog in the Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena, which he painted in about 1625 (Salerno, 1988, p. 186, n° 104). In the Norton Simon Museum picture, as Denim Mahon discovered, the mastiff wears a red collar studded occasionally with gold stars, one of the emblems of the Aldovrandi family. The dog in the present picture seems also to have a red collar but it is plain.

(11) London, British Museum: 1895-9-15-697; pen and brown wash; 189 x 265 mm. for recent discussion of this sheet, see A. Weston-Lewis, “Francesco Albani disegnatore: some Additions and Clarifications”, Master Drawings, XLIV, n° 3, 2006, pp. 317-19, repr. And S. Lore, exh.cat., 2011, p.244, no. 100 (entry by S. Loire). Some thirty years, or more, later Guercino went back to Albani’s composition, using the pose of Venus, with both her hands raised dramatically in the air in shock and disbelief, for his own Venus in the Death of Adonis, commissioned in 1646 by Cardinal Mazzarin and formerly in the Staatliche Gemaldegalerie, Dresden (Salerno, 1988, p. 311, no. 237). Also, the placement of Adoni’s corpse in Guercino’s later painting is partly inspired by Albani’s compositions, but at the same time it is a re-shaping, in reverse, of his own much earlier figure in the present canvas.

(12) Malvasia, 1841, II, p.279: Ghelfi, 1997, p. 19f

(13) Domenichino and Albani were life-long friends, having worked together in Rome in the studio of Annibale Carracci, and Domenichino may have brought drawings after the two paintings to Bologna in 1612. Their friendship continued into later life, the two still corresponded following Domenichino’s transfer to Naples in 1631.

(14) For an excellent investigation into Guercino’s Account Book, see Ghelfi, 1997, pp. 17-51. Guercino was 38 years old when he began it.

(15) Gratitude to Niccolò Orsini for his advice on this point. Interestingly, S. Pancrazio holds three barley-ears in his right hand in Guercino’s altarpiece of the Madonna and Child in Glory with S. Pancrazio and a Sainted Nun (S. Chiara), painted around 1615 for the parish church of S. Sebastiano, Renazzo di Cento, the blood of the martyred saint purportedly having a similarly effect on the ground where his life was lost (Salerno, 1988, pp. 92-93)

(16) Such a patron might have been Conte Filippo Aldovrandi of Bologna, with whom Guercino was on friendly terms and who had a country residence near Cento, the Villa Giovannini. The count commissioned Guercino around 1625 to paint his favourite mastiff, a painting referred to under note 10 and 12. In 1642, when fighting between the Farnese and Urban VIII Barberini threatened to destabilize Cento, the count invited Guercino to stay with him in Bologna, where he remained following the death of Guido Reni. Ulisse Aldovrandi (1522-1605), a family forebear, was an important early naturalist and the first professor of Natural Sciences at Bologna University.

On the basis of a photograph David Stone does not accept the attribution to Guercino for the present lot.

additional pictures
Francesco Albani, Death of Adonis, pen and brown wash, 189 x 265 mm, London, British Museum, inv. 1895-9-15-697
Giovan Francesco Barbieri, called il Guercino, Death of Adonis, formerly Dresden, Staatliche Gemäldegalerie
Tommaso Piroli (1752–1824), Death of Adonis, engraving after Guercino
Infrared reflectograph