Ut Pictura Poesis : Billedspråk og narrativ i Guercinos Tancredi

Abstract

Guercinos pronounced change of style during his lasting production has been a critical and biographical topos since the earliest writerts. Subsequently the change has been analysed and explained with regard to internal and external artistic developments. Apart from Sybille Ebert-Schifferes 1992 article ”Ma c’hanno da fare i precetti dell’oratore con quelli della pittura?: Reflections on Guercino’s narrative structure”, the consequences of pictorial narrative has yet to be critically treated. In this thesis I present Guercinos two versions of Erminia finding the wounded Tancredi from c1619 and c1651 and analyse their style of narrative delivery. I examine the pictures’ relations to their textual source in Tassos Gerusalemme Liberata, a textual source of considerable complexity. The analysis finds that Guercinos revision of his pictorial language corresponds with Tassos revision of his epic nearly a century earlier. The critical language of the reception of both Tasso and Guercino is somewhat alike, grounded on similar ideas of the likeness between poetry and painting as manifest in the interpretational paradigm of Ut Pictura Poesis. From this perspective the thesis examines the surplus narrative levels of Guercinos early Tancredi and the implications of this within the critical paradigm.