Two main facts about Guercino’s art have become critical commonplaces in the art-historical literature. The first is that his paintings are “theatrical,” and the second is that his style underwent a significant and irreversible shift at a certain point in his career, usually identified as his seminal two-year Roman sojourn. Neither of these facts is disputable, but the motives and particularities behind them have tended to resist elucidation. This presentation will demonstrate that Guercino’s “theatricality” and his stylistic evolution, are inexorably linked.

Shilpa Prasad, 2001-2003 Fellow in the History of Art, is an independent scholar and translator based in Lucca, Italy. A specialist on Guercino, her research focuses primarily on the relationship between theatre and painting in the seventeenth century, and in particular on the creation of new genres such as opera and their construction of a new kind of spectator. She is currently working on the translation, annotation and critical edition of Malvasia’s Life of Guercino for the multi-volume series sponsored by the Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC).