Barocci exhibition review: is he better unfinished?

The press release blithely informs us that Federico Barocci (1535–1612) is ‘beloved by artists and art historians throughout the ages’, but I must beg to differ. Not by me, nor by any of my considerable range of friends and acquaintances in both fields, has he been loved or even much known. Barocci is one of those artists who has slipped under the general radar, partly, I suspect, because his work often looks like a sweet and sentimentalised version of Raphael. Raphael is a great genius, but there are a number of paintings by him I find hard to take, particularly when he descends to sickly emotionalism. Barocci seems to take this path quite a few steps further, which is probably why my eye has slid quickly across his work, and silently edited him out of my personal pantheon. But this is clearly a mistake, as this substantial exhibition, supported by the Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation, demonstrates. I still don’t like many of his paintings, but the drawings and studies are an absolute revelation.

Barocci was a master of process, not only drawing in pastel and chalk, ink and wash, but also pioneering the oil sketch long before it became an accepted artistic practice. There are more than 65 preparatory drawings and studies in this show, and in nearly every case they outshine the finished works. Room 1 in this Sainsbury Wing exhibition is dominated by a painting of the Immaculate Conception (1574–5) that is certainly full of life and movement but which is too saccharine in colour for my taste. More interesting are the nude studies of the girl modelling for the Virgin Mary, which Barocci made to get the body to look right beneath the robes. He took enormous pains and was nothing if not thorough in his researches. Compare the compositional studies for the ‘Madonna of the Cat’, also in this first room.