Guido Reni
Italian, 1575 - 1642
Returning to Bologna, he worked with Ludovico Carracci between 1604 and 1605, decorating the cloister of the convent of S Michele in Bosco just outside the city. He continued in his attempts to fulfil his dream of matching, or even surpassing, the work of Caravaggio, failing to realise that his work was of a very different order. In fact, his style was rapidly moving towards one that owed much more to Raphael, Correggio and the Cavaliere d'Arpino (Giuseppe Cesare Arpino) and importantly, the art of classical antiquity.
His manner became smoother and the tones more silvery, an example of this style being his St Andrew Led to Martyrdom (1608-1609) painted for the church of S Gregorio Magno in Rome and a work not without grandeur. In 1610, he decorated the Capella dell'Annunciata in the Palazzo del Quirinale, painting in an elegant and sensual manner that could not be more different from that of the Baroque style. Reni was turning increasingly to a classicism derived from Raphael where the balance of the composition was absolute and essential. His Massacre of the Innocents, painted in 1611 for the church of S Domenico in Bologna, is based on a rigorous composition recalling classical tragedy. Despite the horrors of the massacre, there is no confusion in the arrangement of this canvas where each element is mirrored almost symmetrically by an answering one.
In the same year, he painted a Victorious Samson to be placed over the fireplace in the palazzo of Count Zambeccari in Bologna. Despite some attempts at a Caravaggesque chiaroscuro, this work is a good example of Reni's cult of ideal beauty, very different from the work of Caravaggio. Returning to Rome in 1612, he worked on the decoration of the Cappella Paolina (Cappella Borghese) in S Maria Maggiore and at the Casino Rospigliosi, where his Aurora (1613-1614) was to earn him great fame at a time when Rome was looking for a new artist to replace Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio, who by now were both dead.
The classical character of Guido Reni's work, with its close links with the art of Antiquity, was by now established. In Bologna in 1615, he painted The Apotheosis of St Dominic for the apse of the church of S Domenico and in 1616, a Deposition for the Chiesa dei Mendicanti. His paintings of mythological or profane subjects are not improved by a certain sentimentality, something that becomes even more pronounced in his religious works. While compositions like the Four Deeds of Hercules, painted for the Duke of Mantua between 1617 and 1621, or the Atalanta and Hippomenes in Naples and painted between 1624 and 1626, have a robust style and the idealised beauty of Antiquity, other compositions by Reni, such as the Baptism of Christ of 1623 or the Ecce Homo, have an insipid sweetness, a sensual grace and a sentimentalism which are only prevented from overpowering the work by his use of fluid colours.
The latter part of Reni's career, therefore, was divided between the production of superficial, emotional and melodramatic compositions such as Mary Magdalene, and paintings in a more elevated style like the Crucifixion for the church of S Lorenzo in Lucina in Rome or the Adoration of the Shepherds in the Carthusian church of S Martino in Naples (1640-1642). Guido Reni's fame was so great that he received invitations from the Kings of England and Spain, and Catherine de Medici, Regent of France, all of which he refused.
Guido Reni falls into that category of artists who are admired in their time - and perhaps even for a further century - by at least one section of society but who fall entirely into disrepute some two centuries later. They are eventually partially rehabilitated but their weaknesses recognised. Today, as far as Guido Reni is concerned, we are in the third phase. After a period in the 17th and 18th century when he was fashionable among a particular section of the public, he fell from favour in the 19th century. Today, we cannot avoid seeing his weaknesses and being aware, particularly, of his negative influence on a particular style of religious art, yet there are also merits to be appreciated. One of the first scholars to develop a socio-historical approach to art history, Lionello Venturi, has provided an analysis of the works of Guido Reni which takes account of the enormous variations in the judgements made of Reni in his time and in ours:
The art of Guido Reni was a true reflection of what his contemporaries and several generations that followed sought in painting... It is said that Guido Reni boasted of having at his disposition several different ways of painting a female saint raising her eyes to heaven... And while it may be true that no artist is responsible for the mediocrity of those who talk about their work, it is nevertheless certain that one can already detect in Guido Reni's art the exaggerations that were to follow; in this the reaction against his work in the early years of romanticism can be seen as fully justified... It can be said that, for the French, Guido Reni can be considered to be the true propagator of what was later to be known as the St-Sulpice School of painting.
"RENI, Guido." In Benezit Dictionary of Artists. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/benezit/B00151059 (accessed April 12, 2012).
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