Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino(1591–1666)

Trois Crayons Newsletter. August 2024

Can we fool you? The term “fake” may be slightly sensationalist when it comes to old drawings. Copying originals and prints has formed a key part of an artist’s education since the Renaissance and with the passing of time the distinction between the two can be innocently mistaken.

I won’t take as hard a line on this as Sir Nicholas Penny, former director of the National Gallery, London, who once wrote in the Burlington Magazine that "no one in future can have any excuse for not instantly recognizing his hand". I will even proffer a clue in that two engravings and over 100 years separate these pen and ink landscapes. In spite of the slightly poor quality of the lower image - mea culpa! – I’m sure that readers will now have no trouble in telling the real from the fake and not disappointing Sir Nicholas!

Jean Pesne after Guercino, Paesaggio con rovine, plate 6, British Museum, London

Ludovico Mattioli after Jean Pesne after Guercino, Paesaggio con rovine, Accademia Carrara, Bergamo

• ANSWER

  The original, of course, is the lower image. The drawing is by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Guercino. The upper image is by the notorious ‘Falsario del Guercino’.

  Upper image: Falsario del Guercino, Paesaggio con rovine, Cento, Pinacoteca Civica

  Lower image: Guercino, Paesaggio con rovine, Chatsworth, Devonshire Collection

  Although the Falsario del Guercino remains anonymous, they have been identified as a late eighteenth-century Italian artist who systematically plagiarized the drawings of Guercino and created numerous landscapes in a Guercinesque manner. His prolific production of drawings, and his exaggeration of Guercino's suggestive use of line, attest to the contemporary collecting zeitgeist for Guercino's drawings, and to the lucrative nature of the falsario’s business. They created Guercinesque drawings using motifs taken from prints after genuine drawings and interspersed these with passages of their own invention.

  As noted earlier, the fortune of these two drawings can be traced through two further engravings. These engravings belong to two series upon which the falsario was largely dependent for their compositions, as opposed to Guercino’s original drawings, which they likely never saw. Before Guercino’s original drawing arrived in London, and ultimately at Chatsworth, it formed part of a group of landscapes which were etched by Jean Pesne (1623-1700) in Paris in 1678. Pesne removed the figures and reversed the composition’s original orientation. In 1747 Ludovico Mattioli (1662-1747) created another set of prints after Pesne’s series, making further revisions to the composition and reversing the orientation again, returning it to the same sense as Guercino’s original. It is from this last print that the falsario worked to create their elaborated forgery. The drawing belongs to a group of similarly contrived drawings in the Pinacoteca Civica, Cento. Like a game of Broken Telephone, the falsario’s forgery, removed by two degrees, has grown further and further from the truth.