RENI, GUIDO. - Painter, b. at Calvenzano (Bologna) on 4 Nov. 1575, d. at Bologna on 9 Aug. 1642. At the age of twenty, in the school of the Carracci, he assimilated the canons 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 won widespread renown, at home and abroad, and in 1600, with the favor of the Cavalier d'Arpino, he moved to Rome, where he remained until 1610, carrying out important commissions for mural painting on behalf of Pope Paul V. Following disagreements with the pontifical treasury, he returned to Bologna; but he was in Rome again through the Pope's intervention. In 1617, however, R. was once more in Bologna, where he did not lack important commissions, including from foreign sovereigns, and unprecedented honors. In 1620, at Ravenna, he frescoed the Chapel of the Santissimo in the Cathedral, and in 1627 he was in Rome for the third time. Having settled shortly thereafter definitively in his native city, during his last period he devoted himself to an excessive and commonplace output, harassed by debts contracted through gambling.
Endowed with exceptional gifts for pictorial expression, R. stands out among the best-known masters of the seventeenth-century Bolognese school for a highly developed feeling for bodily loveliness and grace and for a chromatic system capable of achieving the subtlest transitions and shadings in the ranges of pearl gray, ivory white, rose, and pale pink. In the formal sphere, his typical richness of modeling asserts itself, in which a good youthful practice in clay modeling plays a part, though not openly; and in the inventive or imaginative sphere his classicizing idealism, founded on the study of Raphael and of Greek sculpture (one should not forget the iconographic relations with the statues of the Niobids and with the Medici Venus), allowed 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 characteristics of R.'s art, too greatly undermined by sentimental conventionalism and languid pietism, has carried out serious discriminations within that repertory of scenes and figures, voluptuous and pathetic by turns, bringing to the fore works of little popularity or hitherto neglected. In his Roman production, today one appreciates, more than the too-celebrated Aurora, frescoed in the Casino Rospigliosi, or the feminine St. Michael the Archangel in the church of the Capuchins, the bold and truly pictorial fresco of St. Andrew Led to Martyrdom, in a chapel of S. Gregorio al Celio; the other most delicate frescoes at the Quirinale and at S. Maria Maggiore; the robust Crucifixion of St. Peter, in the Vatican Pinacoteca; the composed, elegiac Crucifix of S. Lorenzo in Lucina. Even in the Pinacoteca of Bologna it is not the more ambitious paintings, such as the colossal and theatrical Pietà, divided transversely into two distinct zones, the Samson in athletic pose, or the Massacre of the Innocents
(not without very noble details) that captivate today's taste, but rather the two marvelous portraits of the Mother and the Nurse, dense with profound human vitality. The master's masterpieces, however, in the sphere of oil painting, remain the group of Atalanta and Hippomenes (National Museum of Naples), where the firmness of modeling and the sweetness of Renian coloristic timbres unfold most exquisitely, and the St. Andrew Corsini in Ecstasy (formerly in the Barberini Gallery in Rome, of which there is a mosaic translation at S. Giovanni in Laterano), a work infused with a touching religious spirit. For a complete evaluation of this art, an examination of the approximately sixty etchings is also profitable, for the most part on sacred subjects (nine plates reproduce the ornamental apparatus that the young artist designed in 1598, on the occasion of the arrival in Bologna of Pope Clement VIII), since they often allow one to grasp the most intimate meanings of R.'s imagination and the most immediate virtues of his animating touch.
It is said that about two hundred pupils flocked to his school, often employed in the execution of works which, under the master's name, certainly did not benefit his renown. Among the most valid remain, in the history of Italian painting, Guido Cagnacci of Rimini and Simone Cantarini of Pesaro. - See plate XL.
Bibliography9 works
Alberto Neppi