Landscape with a Church beside a Lake with Boats,

ca. 1630–40

Guercino created this landscape by overlapping three different sections, similar to the scenography used in seventeenth-century theaters. The foreground is the densest and most heavily inked of the three zones, in sharp contrast to the nearly blank middle ground. A stately Renaissance church dominates the background, and Guercino’s addition of scaffolding to the right of the building provides a modern detail—and thus suggests that the viewer is looking at an actual scene. Guercino’s landscapes, made for his own pleasure or as gifts for others, usually do not depict specific locations but were based on his imagination.