The apostle is portrayed as an elderly man with a beard and flowing hair, whose gaze, veiled with sadness, is fixed on an undetermined point outside the frame. Nearly the whole surface is occupied by the half-length figure of the saint who, depicted in three-quarter profile in close-up, stands out against the black background. The old man is effortlessly holding an X-shaped cross, the instrument of his martyrdom and customary iconographic attribute. The small size and contemplative mood suggest that the work was perhaps used for private worship.

The work is not known to scholarship and should be assigned to Guercino’s late production. In fact, it is not mentioned by the biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia1 and does not appear in the recent monographs devoted to the painter.2 Nor can it be identified with either of the two paintings of St Andrew listed in the Libro dei conti (Account Book)3 that Guercino kept, with the help of his brother and collaborator Paolo Antonio Barbieri and his nephew Benedetto Gennari, until his death in 1666. Only two works are documented under this title: a half-length piece commissioned in 1656 by the Governor of Cento, Pietro Mancurti da Imola - identified as the painting of a larger size formerly in the Koelliker Collection in London4 - characterised by a softer, more ethereal texture and less contrasting colours than those in the Cerruti version; and a second half-length painting, paid for in 1643 by the prior of the Carmelites of the basilica of San Martino in Bologna. The account book’s price of fifty ducatoni, possibly a trifle high with respect to the size, does not enable us to identify with certainty the painting under examination with this second work.

There is also scant information about the work’s ownership history. The exact date of its entering the Cerruti Collection is not known, but he must definitely have purchased it after 1983, when the St Andrew is documented in an anonymous private collection in Milan.5 However, the painting must have been on the antiques market at least since 1967, as we learn from an evaluation made by Carlo Volpe for an unknown individual, in which the Bolognese scholar recognises “without any hesitation the finest quality of the late period of Giovan Francesco Barbieri from Cento”.6

The apostle is portrayed as an elderly man with a beard and flowing hair, whose gaze, veiled with sadness, is fixed on an undetermined point outside the frame. Nearly the whole surface is occupied by the half-length figure of the saint who, depicted in three-quarter profile in close-up, stands out against the black background. The old man is effortlessly holding an X-shaped cross, the instrument of his martyrdom and customary iconographic attribute. The small size and contemplative mood suggest that the work was perhaps used for private worship.

The textured finish and soft brushstrokes - still characterised by nuanced chiaroscuro - that depict the wrinkles on the saint’s brow and his sunken eyes with touches of light, place the work in the fifth decade of the 17th century. A period that coincides with Il Guercino’s move from his native Cento to Bologna in 1642, where he also transferred his flourishing workshop, turning out as many altarpieces as he did easel paintings. The physiognomy was already recurrent in the artist’s work in the 1740s, and the Cerruti St Andrew was in fact painted between the Ecce Homo in the Galleria Corsini, Rome, (1644; inv. no. 91), and the St Paul in the Louvre (1644; inv. no. 80). The St Andrew is the same size as the other two, with which it shares the black background and certain figures of saints executed in the second half of the decade. This work displays affinities with St Paul, the First Hermit Nourished by a Crow, recently made known by David Stone7 with a dating between 1644 and 1649; St Jerome in the Harris Collection, New York (1648) and the oval with St Joseph in the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna (1648-49; inv. no. 454), in which we find the same violet used for the mantle of St Andrew, a stylistic cipher of Guercino’s late period. In this sense, the choice of subtle, jewel-like colours seems to anticipate the characteristics of the artist’s language of the sixth decade of the 17th century. 

[Francesca Romana Gaja]

1 Malvasia 1678, vol. II; Malvasia1841, vol. II.

2 Bologna 1968; Salerno1988; Bologna - Cento1991; Stone1991; Turner2017.

3 Libro dei conti 1997, pp. 115-116, 172. 

4 Turner 2017, p. 725. 

5 Fototeca Zeri, entry 57039.

6 Fototeca Zeri, entry PI_0548/6/35. My thanks to Prof. Benati, Dr Culatti and the Zeri Foundation of Bologna for their assistance.

7 Stone 2017, pp. 152-157.