Daniel M Unger

The article highlights the added value with which the scene of David with the head of Goliath has accumulated in the seventeenth century. During this period these paintings were intended to represent the young David as a penitent saint atoning for his sins rather than the divinely supported triumph of the young shepherd over Goliath, the skilled and talented military hero. What is emphasized is the a-temporal nature of this iconography, using David, the boy who killed Goliath as atoning for his most grievous sin that he committed many years later when he was already king of Israel toward Uriah the Hittite. In what follows I would like to characterize the unique iconography developed in the early seventeenth century, which represents the young David as a penitent while Goliath’s head signals the memento mori. Goliath’s severed head stands for the skulls appearing in other visual representations of penitent saints.

This article focuses on Guercino’s Return of the Prodigal Son, commissioned in the name of Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi and on his marketing choices. This is a case study in terms of self-promotion tactics employed by an ambitious artist. My argument is that one finds in the painting a secondary and more sophisticated level of interpretation, which relates to the relationship between the painter and his patron. To the most traditional iconography of the scene, Guercino added musicians and spectators, thus positioning the entire composition in the theatre. One of the musicians is depicted in a way that casts him as a representative of the painter. The patron understood Guercino’s intentions and commissioned what became Guercino’s most important artworks. It was Guercino’s ability of shifting the attention of a given iconography and deliver current political meaning that is discernible in his Roman works commissioned by the same Cardinal Ludovisi who was elected Pope Gregory XV.

Soon after the canonization of St. Carlo Borromeo, Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani commissioned Lorenzo Garbieri to create three paintings for one of the chapels in the newly-erected Barnabite church of San Paolo Maggiore in the center of Bologna, with scenes taken from the new saint's life. This was the first chapel to be decorated in the church. Here, as will be argued below, one may find the seeds of what eventually became common in representations of the saint: Barnabite propaganda meant to accentuate not only the saint himself and his important altruistic deeds, but also the order's part in those deeds, as well as the connections between the saint and the Barnabites. An emphasis is given to the Barnabites' participation in the very deeds that became associated with the saint and through which he became known during his lifetime as a living saint.