RENI, GUIDO. — Painter, born at Calvenzano (Bologna) on 4 November 1575, died at Bologna on 9 August 1642. At the age of twenty, in the school of the Carracci, he assimilated the principles of the eclecticism dominant there, giving rise to the suspicion that the young star would later make “everyone sigh.”
Having left the Carracci academy in 1598, R. immediately gained widespread renown, both at home and abroad, and in 1600, with the support of the cavalier d’Arpino, went to Rome, where he remained until 1610, carrying out important commissions for mural paintings from Pope Paul V. treasury, he returned to Bologna; but he was again in Rome through the intervention of the Pope. In 1617, however, R. was once more in Bologna, where important commissions, including some from foreign sovereigns, and unprecedented honors were not lacking. In 1620, at Ravenna, he frescoed the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in the cathedral, and in 1627 he was in Rome for the third time. Settling shortly thereafter permanently in his native city, during the final period he devoted himself to excessive and shoddy work, hounded by debts incurred through gambling.
Endowed with exceptional gifts of pictorial expression, R. stands out among the best-known masters of the seventeenth-century Bolognese school for a highly developed feeling for bodily beauty and grace, and for a chromatic system capable of achieving the subtlest transitions and nuances in the ranges of pearl gray, ivory white, pink, and pale violet. In the formal sphere, his characteristic modeling in thick, full-bodied masses asserts itself; within it, though not openly apparent, there operates a sound youthful practice in modeling clay. In the sphere of invention and fantasy, his classicizing idealism, founded on the study of Raphael and Greek sculpture (one should not forget the iconographic relationships with the statues of the Niobids and with the Venus de’ Medici), enabled him to embody to the highest degree the traditionalist, or anti-Caravaggesque, current of painting that flourished during the Baroque.
Modern criticism, while recognizing the individual qualities of R.’s art, too greatly undermined by sentimental conventionalism and languid pietism, has made serious distinctions within that repertoire of voluptuous and pathetic scenes and figures, bringing to the fore works of little popularity or hitherto neglected. In his Roman production, today more highly valued than the overly celebrated Aurora, frescoed in the Rosipigliosi casino, or the effeminate St. Michael the Archangel in the church of the Capuchins, are the bold and genuinely pictorial fresco of St. Andrew Led to Martyrdom, in a chapel of S. Gregorio al Celio; the other exquisitely delicate frescoes at the Quirinal and at S. Maria Maggiore; the robust Crucifixion of St. Peter, in the Vatican Pinacoteca; and the restrained, elegiac Crucifix in S. Lorenzo in Lucina. Nor is it the more ambitious paintings in the Bologna Pinacoteca, such as the colossal and theatrical Pietà, divided transversely into two distinct zones, the Samson in an athletic pose, or the Massacre of the Innocents
(not lacking some highly noble details) that appeal to contemporary taste, but rather the two marvelous portraits of the Mother and the Nurse, imbued with profound human vitality. The master’s masterpieces in the practice of oil painting remain, however, the group of Atalanta and Hippomenes (National Museum of Naples), in which the plastic firmness and the sweetness of Reni’s color harmonies unfold in their most refined form, and St. Andrew Corsini in Ecstasy (formerly in the Barberini Gallery in Rome, and of which there is a mosaic translation in S. Giovanni in Laterano), a work infused with moving religious spirit. For a complete assessment of this art, examination of the approximately sixty etchings, most of them on sacred subjects, is also fruitful (nine plates reproduce the ornamental decoration that the young artist designed in 1598 on the occasion of Pope Clement VIII’s visit to Bologna), since they often make it possible to grasp the innermost meanings of R.’s imagination and the most immediate qualities of his enlivening touch.
It is said that approximately two hundred pupils attended his school, often employed in the execution of works that, produced under the master’s name, certainly did not enhance his renown. Among the most accomplished, Guido Cagnacci of Rimini and Simone Cantarini of Pesaro retain a place in the history of Italian painting. — Vedi tav. XL.