SAN DIEGO, CA.- The Timken Museum of Art is presently showing an exhibit of works of art made by Guercino through January 7, 2007. This Timken-organized focus exhibition examines the marked change in style that characterizes the early and late works of a master painter of Baroque Italy: Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino (1591-1666). The exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Guercino: Stylistic Evolution in Focus, authored by art historian Shilpa Prasad, yield a new explanation for changes in the artist's style, one that focuses on shifting conceptions of representation and spectatorship in Italy during the 1600s.

Featured in the exhibition are two "sets" of paintings with the same subject, a recently rediscovered self-portrait-the only known self portrait by Guercino, (National Gallery of Art, Washington) -- and an early, justly celebrated masterwork, Erminia and the Shepherd (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, England). Assembled together for the first time ever are three paintings on the New Testament theme of the Prodigal Son, now in the collections of the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna (1619); Galleria Borghese, Rome (c.1627-28); and the Timken Museum of Art (1654-55). The exhibition also features early and late depictions of another story of filial piety -- Samson Bringing Honey to His Parents. These paintings date from c. 1625-26 and 1657 and are on loan, respectively, from the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.