Drawings by Guercino and Representations of Saint Sebastian at Princeton

This two-part installation builds on the current gallery display of Guercino's Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (ca. 1632) and Simon Vouet's Saint Sebastian (ca. 1620-27), both on loan to the Museum through January. Several representations of this Early Christian saint, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, offer a framework for the two Baroque paintings on view, while a selection of Guercino's drawings from Princeton's holdings-considered to be the finest in North America-exemplifies the artist’s extraordinary draftsmanship. 

According to legend, Saint Sebastian was bound and shot with arrows under the command of the Roman Emperor Diocletian. Sebastian survived this first attempt on his life, which led to his role as a protector against the plague. Although he was ultimately beaten to death with a club, Sebastian is most often represented enduring the fire of arrows, against a post or a tree, either pierced or holding the weapons. In the works on view here, Sebastian is often shown as a partially nude figure, his youthful body in a contorted pose that enabled artists to engage with anatomical detail. Federico arocci’s preparatory drawing for the Crucifixion altarpiece in the Cathedral of Genoa, for example, reveals the artist’s fascination with modeling the outlines of Sebastian’s muscular body and capturing the effects of light on his collarbone and legs. Hans Baldung Grien’s woodcut is a more shocking depiction, in which Sebastian's body is displayed in a painfully angular pose, nearly broken by his suffering. 

The seventeenth-century artist Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Guercino, engaged with the subject of Sebastian numerous times. This selection of drawings highlights the artist's exploration of various figural arrangements through his sketches, as well as his interest in creating genre scenes, landscapes, and caricatures unrelated to commissioned works. It is fascinating to consider that the same artist who created the devotional painting of Sebastian could also engage in light-hearted caricatures like Bespectacled Man Reading a Book, one of twenty-three original drawings by Guercino
assembled into a caricature album that later entered the Museum's collection. In the study for Queen Semiramis Receiving News of the Revolt of Babylon, Guercino's signature use of calligraphic lines is visible in the figures' garments. The unsettling scene of Arrest of Christ offers yet another example of Guercino's range of drawing techniques, as he subtly applied areas of wash to create dramatic nocturnal lighting effects.

Veronica Maria White
Curatorial Assistant for Academic Programs