Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
Italian; 17th-century
Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art
52%
Christ and the Samaritan Woman. c1650. Oil on canvas
You can see here the revolutions in painting of the early 17th century — namely, the Baroque's violent engagement with picture-making's raw facts — giving way to a softness and an easiness that is counter to art. The whole subsequent history of sentimental painting seems thus to be laid out in Guercino. It's recognizable in: the uncomplicated poise of the composition, whereby Christ's three-quarter turn balances out the Samaritan woman's stance in profile but fails either to carve the picture into further depth or to send it out towards the front of the canvas; that shrinking, noncommittal repoussoir at left, which bounds the picture commanding that your eye go anywhere in particular; the shadowy modeling, which gives the figures a sort of drama, but one that doesn't relate to the scene's unfolding in space; the ambivalence of the sky and the town with respect to the action in the foreground; the invisibility of Guercino's handling (especially in the figures), which is less a virtue of illusionism and more an equivocation. There is indeed resolve in this painting, but it's a resolve that points to the pure pleasures of kitsch. (TFS, 2025)