Mariä Himmelfahrt

In 1623 the pope who had made Guercino's career suddenly died. Gregory the Fifteenth was a Bologna man, and two years earlier he had called the young painter down to Rome, where the commissions came fast. When Gregory died that summer the Roman door swung shut, and Guercino packed up and went home to the small town of Cento. This towering Assumption belongs to those charged years, more than ten feet tall, the Virgin swept upward in red and blue while the apostles crowd around her empty tomb below. The paint is loose and the light theatrical, the manner he had sharpened in Rome. It reached the Hermitage in 1843, bought from the Tanari family of Bologna.