Mar 16, 2026
3 min read
An exhibition focusing on representations of biblical women by the Italian painter has opened at the Thyssen Museum in Madrid, which serves to illustrate a radical shift in his style.
Il Guercino and the evolution of the self-taught painter who admired the Baroque masters
The Thyssen Museum in Madrid opens an exhibition dedicated to the Italian artist's representation of biblical women, showing his dramatic change in style
When Ludovico Carassi, one of the great painters of the Italian Baroque, first encountered the work of Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, he described the author as "a phenomenon of nature, a miracle that leaves even the most famous artists speechless".The 26-year-old entered a world that already knew Titian or Caravaggio and saw the birth of others such as Guido Reni, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Van Dyck or Ribera.The essentials in style were forgotten, causing the artist to create more classical paintings and gestures.
The Thissen Museum in Madrid has in its collection one of the paintings from the second period, Jesus and the Samaritan at the Well, and has used it to collect five others - on loan from institutions such as the Prado Museum, the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London or the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Strasbourg - in Guercino and its small exhibition2 Biblical Heroine which will remain open until June.approached the female figure in biblical themes, the exhibition it serves, primarily to understand the gradual but decisive change in style.
Il Guercino - which translates as 'cross-eyed' because, yes, the artist had strabismus - was born in Ceno, a small town in Bologna, in 1591. "His parents were farmers, so he was self-taught. He said he learned from the contemplation of nature and always cited one work in particular as a great influence," says Maria Cara: an altarpiece by the Eduvicia fountain in the Eudovicia church.Alonso exhibition.This empirical observation is particularly evident in his early works, where there is also a clear influence of the current represented by Caravaggio or Carracci and the great masters of Venice in the 16th century such as Titian, and which have characters "in the foreground, in a narrow space, with a great emotional charge and intense chiaroscuro".
This is well illustrated by one of the oldest paintings in the exhibition: Susanna and the Elders, a loan from the Prado that shows a famous passage from the Old Testament, in which a young woman takes a shocking bath while two older judges accuse her of adultery.Alonso said: "Let us understand that it is the century of the anti-reformation, and draw this reality so that they are surprised and live in faith," said Alonso: "We call it poetry or the theater of love."
What happened to abandon the style with which you were beginning to achieve success? In addition to attracting Carachi, Guercino's paintings had many important followers - Velázquez visited him "probably to convince him to work at the court in Madrid," said Alonso. One of those was Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi of Bologna, who later became Pope Gregory XV and invited him to live and work in Rome in 1621, where he stayedartist until Ludovisi's death two years later. "He came into contact with other paintings, classical sculpture, and theorists who talked about the importance of painting and coloring," said the curator.
The process of change is illustrated by two works in a small room, Samson and Delilah and Salome receiving the head of John the Baptist.Both with colors and characters that are brighter and brighter with more space between them.Preamble to works like Thyssen's work which, in addition to being classical, Guercino rejects the spontaneity of the characters, in exchange for "frozen gestures and codes", symmetry and a clear "moralizing intention".great and never gave up his personal style and special language."
Despite the change, the painter has always maintained a great narrative ability and mastery of the language of the ghettos, and the main characters of the exhibition prove that.As Guillermo Solana, artistic director of the Madrid museum, says, the exhibition is "completely structural" because there are six paintings that correspond directly to three types of biblical heroines, each represented by two paintings.The director says, "absolutely pure and innocent, blameless and wrong done,"—as Abraham rejects Hagar and Ishmael—;others are "a little more obscure," penitent sinners—Jesus and the adulteress—;and the femmes fatales, pure heroines in the works of the Italians." Naiki. brandishes scissors like a sword."
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