Why is a cross-eyed man from the small town of Cento in northern Italy now regarded as one of the greatest draftsmen of the seventeenth century? Featuring important Guercino drawings from the Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, this volume looks deeply into the nature of the artist’s extraordinary talent for drawing.

• Foreword
  Michael Brand and Deborah Swallow
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Guercino’s Life
• The Casa Gennari and the Provenance of Sir Robert Witt’s Guercino Drawings
• Characterizing Guercino’s Draftsmanship
  • Inventiveness and Process
  • Energy and Spontaneity
  • Texture, Shadow, Light, and Space
  • Humor and Humanity
• Notes
• Catalogue
• Exhibitions and Literature Cited
• Index
• About the Author

Julian Brooks, Assistant Curator of Drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, is a specialist of Italian sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drawings. From 2000 to 2003 he was Print Room Supervisor at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, where he co-curated, with Catherine Whistler, and wrote the catalogue for, the exhibition Graceful and True: Drawing in Florence c. 1600 (Oxford, 2003). He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1999; his thesis studied The Drawings of Andrea Boscoli (c. 1560–1608).