Footnotes

• We are grateful to Nicholas Turner for his assistance in this catalogue entry.
  
  The late red chalk drawings by Guercino, made in Bologna when he was in his fifties and sixties, are strikingly different in appearance from those in the same medium done twenty or thirty years earlier. The precision of line and volume that characterises the red chalk drawings of his early and mature periods is replaced by a frailty of execution, befitting a man in old age, through his tremulous touch he gives them an added spiritual dimension. As in the present composition, form is suggested by carefully modulated patches of tone. The parallel hatching to indicate shadow in the background has something of the force of Guercino's earlier drawings. At the end of his career, with the artist perhaps over-conscious of his role as Guido Reni's successor as Bologna's leading painter, the figures in Guercino's paintings and drawings are elegant in movement and classical in form, and are often clad in heavy drapery, as is Isaiah here. In spite of this change in representational outlook, Guercino's sensibility to the play of light and shadow remained constant, and is admirably shown in the illumination of Isaiah's left sleeve and the cloak over his left shoulder, this latter casting deep, velvety shadow across half his waist.

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Category: Fine Art / Old Master Paintings

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