GOING FOR BAROQUE Into the Bin - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Guercino
Study
for Samson
Captured by the
Philistines, 1619
Uffizi, Florence
35
Guercino
Study
for Samson
Captured by the Philistines, 1619
Pen and brown ink, brown wash, 9%
Teylers Museum, Haarlem
x 16 XA in. (23.7 x 41.2 cm).
of Reni's Massacre
of the Innocents, a violent subject has been chosen. Samson's lover, the
deceitful Philistine Delilah, has coaxed from him the secret of his
strength?his long hair.
While the Jewish hero
sleeps
in her
lap, she cuts his hair and then signals
Philistine soldiers
to rush in, bind, and blind Samson.
a
Through
series of we can drawings
follow Guercino's
evolving
ideas about
treating
this moral tale of strength
humbled
by
the wiles of a woman. In
one
(identified by Nicholas Turner)
Samson is shown
frontally, sprawled
on the ground
and
struggling
like some biblical Laoco?n between Delilah and his captors (fig. 34).
In another
the shorn Samson is bound
by a man and woman, while Delilah
delightedly displays
the scis
sors and hair that have deprived
him of his
strength
to the soldiers
at
arriving
the right (fig. 35).
Then the artist had the brilliant idea of turning
Samson away from the viewer and making
his futile attempts to free himself the vortex of the composition (fig. 33).
The
rippling
muscles
of Samson's back and the desperate
action of his feet and hands communicate his distress. In
a fashion that would have met with Aristotle's approval, the horrifying
act of piercing
Sam
son's eyes is alluded to rather than described. We
experience
the drama
through
the expres
sions and actions of Samson's captors. In arriving
at this solution, which transforms a poten
tially merely gory subject
into one that enormous gives
aesthetic satisfaction, Guercino may
well have recalled a story told by
the ancient writers Pliny
and Quintillian.
It seems that the
painter Timantheus of won Cyprus
universal
praise
for a picture showing Iphigenia
about to
be sacrificed. The artist, having
exhausted his powers of invention
portraying
the sorrow of
those in attendance, suggested
the overwhelming grief
of Iphigenia's
father by depicting
him
with his head covered, leaving
the viewer to imagine
what was not portrayed.
This is exactly
what Guercino has done, and it may be that he expected
his knowledgeable patron
to recog
nize the interpolation
of an idea
tracing
its origins
to ancient
practice. We need think only
of
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