The Guardian Angel

The Expertise

Loyal and beloved disciple of Guercino, Benedetto Gennari has left behind him numerous crucial works through which it is possible to trace a convincing history of the Master’s descendants. The “Guardian Angel” is to be dated to the youth of Gennari, during the seventh decade of the 17th century, and it testifies the love of Guercino’s disciples for that particular aspect in Barbieri’s painting devoted to religious allegories. The grand composition of the Angel within the landscape, guiding the young boy towards the sky, is undoubtedly indebted to the compositional ideas of the later Guercino, yet Gennari is characterized by a more restrained and well outlined design already introducing a new phase, that of the Bolognese painting of the 18th century, to which Gennari himself contributed in his late years. This painting is therefore an interesting testimony of the transformations undergone in the course of time by Guercino’s ideas, which were bound to perpetuate, within the Bolognese tradition and beyond, that dimension of noble feelings and that majestic presentation of the images that made the still active school predominant well after a century from the death of the great Master. (Claudio Strinati)