Resumen de Guercino e la "Notte" Ludovisi
The study drawing in red chalk by Guercino depicting a "Seated youth" (Uffizi, inv. no. 3683 S), recently supposed to be related to the figure of "Night", painted in 1621 in the fresco with "Aurora in her Chariot" in the Casino Ludovisi in Rome, offers a stimulating opportunity to discuss some features of drawing from life and to consider how visual and literary sources operate in close relation in the creative process of the pictorial image.
Actually, in my opinion that evocative painted personification does not seem to have its first graphic formulation in the Uffizi drawing; instead, that figure offers an eloquent insight of Guercino's figurative culture and reveals his use of mnemotenic visual resources, combined with literary references.
If the latter refer, at least in a measure, to Cesare Ripa's "Iconologia", the visual references are instead cleary linked to antique sources. Deepening in this direction the research, it would allow to clarify how, during the 16th Century, the iconographical development of the seated young woman, depicted in a thoughtful attitude or fast asleep, owed its diffusion to the wide circulation of two models from antique sculpture such as the "Nova nupta" and the so called "Cesi's Dacia" or "Germania capta". These, on their turn, originated two different iconographical typologies, sometimes doomed to mutually entwine.
Guercino's "Night" belongs to the vein originated by the marble relief with "Cesi's Dacia" now in the Capitol, which previously had been the model for two intriguingly beautiful prints, one by Dürer and the other by Parmigianino, artists that Guercino had both in great esteem.
