L'accademia del nudo e i manuali del Guercino : saggio di storie dell'arte, teoria dell'immagine e simbolica politica

Includes bibliographical references (pages 149-160).

In 1616, Giovan Francesco Barbieri known as Guercino inaugurated the Accademia del Nudo in Cento. Here, just 25 years old, he gave lessons to his pupils and, to coordinate teaching activities and the constant demands of patrons, codified a set of preparatory drawings that later became engravings, which the Emilian master collected in an early subsidiary manual. In the course of his long life, three albums with engravings all different from each other would see the light of day. The present essay aims at a first systematic cataloging of the sixty-two sheets collected therein.

However, these plates are not only examined with the tools of the art-historical discipline but an interdisciplinary reading was also attempted, involving both the toolbox of semiotics and a symbolic-political approach. Although the subject matter appears to be explicitly about art history what emerges is a text of the history of thought, but also of historical and philosophical method: a reflection, that is, on the spaces of drawing, on potential colors, on lines, elementary artifacts of pictorial elaboration under construction. It is with such assumptions that Guercino's artistic choices must be inserted into the historical culture and dominant philosophies that surrounded his creative outbursts. [Publisher's text]

Giovan Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666), known as Guercino.