Timken Museum
Balboa Park
November 24, 2019
Recently Meredith discovered the 17th century Italian painter Giovanni Francesco Barbieri through a blog post featuring one of his paintings of the Annunciation. The Angelus Project blog posts a new image of the Annunciation each week. Barbieri is better known by his nickname “Il Guercino.”
She wanted to know more about Barbieri, and started with the Wikipedia article about him. Apparently guercino is Italian for “squint-eyed.” His Wikipedia entry has an image done by a contemporary artist, Ottavio Leoni, that shows Barbieri’s right eye crossing in, a form of strabismus (an umbrella term for several types of misalignment of the eyes). Also intriguing was a link in that Wikipedia article to a medical journal article exploring whether Leonardo da Vinci may have had strabismus. Other famous artists with various types of strabismus may include Rembrandt, Dürer, Degas, and Picasso.
We shared this information with our optometrist daughter, who told us that she had been discussing strabismic artists, particularly painters, with a colleague recently. She was struck by the observation that paintings represent a 3D world in a 2D medium, and that translating three dimensions down to two may be easier for people who already see the world in two dimensions because of their strabismus.
Soon after that discussion we were visiting the Timken and discovered that there is a painting in their permanent collection by Barbieri, of the parable of the Prodigal Son. In that parable, the father who welcomes back the errant son represents God forgiving sinners. Luke 15:11-32. A docent at the Timken explained to us that in addition to illustrating the original Gospel story, the painting also represents the Catholic Church of the Counter-Reformation, ready to welcome back Protestants.