GUIDO RENI. - Painter, born in Calvenzano (Bologna) on 4 November 1575, died in Bologna on 9 August 1642. At the age of twenty, in the school of the Carracci, he assimilated the canons of the eclecticism then dominant there, giving rise to the suspicion that the young star would later make “all sigh.”
Having left the Carracci academy in 1598, R. immediately gained widespread renown at home and abroad, and in 1600, with the favor of Cavalier d’Arpino, he moved to Rome, where he remained until 1610, fulfilling important mural painting commissions from Pope Paul V. Following disagreements with the papal treasury, he returned to Bologna; but he was again in Rome at the Pope’s intervention. By 1617, however, he was back in Bologna, where he did not lack important commissions from foreign sovereigns and unprecedented honors. In 1620, in Ravenna, he frescoed the Chapel of the Most Holy Sacrament in the Cathedral, and in 1627 he was in Rome for the third time. Soon after settling definitively in his homeland, he devoted himself during his final years to an excessive and mediocre output, hounded by debts contracted through gambling.
Endowed with exceptional gifts in pictorial expression, R. stands out among the most renowned masters of the Bolognese school of the 17th century for a highly developed feeling for physical beauty and grace, and for a chromatic system capable of achieving the most subtle transitions and nuances in the range of pearl-gray, ivory-white, pink, and reddish hues. In the formal realm, his characteristic thick modeling emerges, in which—though not overtly—plays a sound early practice in clay sculpture; and in the inventive or imaginative realm, his classicizing idealism, grounded in the study of Raphael and Greek sculpture (one should not forget the iconographic connections with the statues of the Niobids and the Medici Venus), enabled him to embody to the highest degree the traditionalist, or anti-Caravaggesque, current of painting that flourished during the Baroque.
Modern criticism, while acknowledging the individual traits of R.’s art, too often undermined by sentimental conventionalism and languid piety, has made careful distinctions within that repertoire of scenes and figures—some voluptuous, some pathetic—placing in the foreground works of lesser popularity or almost neglected refinements. In his Roman production, today more appreciated than the overly famous Aurora frescoed in the Rospigliosi casino or the effeminate St. Michael the Archangel in the church of the Capuchins, are the bold and truly pictorial fresco of St. Andrew Led to Martyrdom, executed 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 composed, elegiac Crucifix in S. Lorenzo in Lucina. Even in the Pinacoteca of Bologna, it is not the most ambitious works—such as the colossal and theatrical Pietà, divided transversely into two distinct zones, the Samson in athletic pose, or the Slaughter of the Innocents (not lacking in noble details)—that captivate contemporary taste, but rather the two marvelous portraits of the Mother and the Wet Nurse, dense with profound human vitality. The master’s masterpieces in the medium of oil painting, however, remain the group of Atalanta and Hippomenes (National Museum of Naples), where the plastic fervor and the suavity of Reni’s coloristic timbres are most refined, and St. Andrew Corsini in Ecstasy (once in the Barberini Gallery in Rome, and of which there is a musical setting in S. Giovanni in Laterano), a work infused with touching religious spirit. A full appreciation of this art also comes from examining the approximately sixty etchings, mostly on sacred subjects (nine plates reproduce the ornamental apparatus the young artist designed in 1598 for the arrival in Bologna of Pope Clement VIII), since they often reveal the deepest meanings of R.’s imagination and the most immediate virtues of his animating touch.
It is said that about two hundred pupils attended his school, often employed in producing works that, bearing the master’s name, certainly did not enhance his reputation. Among the most notable in the history of Italian painting are Guido Cagnacci of Rimini and Simone Cantarini of Pesaro. — See pl. XL.