The first exhibition in the Untied States devoted to the art of the great Italian Baroque painter Guido Reni has stolen in and out of the country without attracting a great deal of attention. After its premiere at the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna, the city of Guido's birth, Guido Reni: 1975-1642 made a fleeting, two-city North American tour that bypassed the major art centers of the northeast, stopping at the Los Angeles Country Museum (which co-organized the exhibition in collaboration with the Pinacoteca Nazionale) and at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.
Sixty-six paintings outline Guido's career from its beginnings in the Academy of the Carracci in Bologna, through his ascendancy in Rome, to his mature phase during his return to the north, culminating in his late style.
Ironically, it is not the naturalism of his masters' example that dominates Guido's work, but the Mannerist tendencies of the sixteenth century against which the Carracci revolted. Though many of the works evince Guido's familiarity with the Carracci and with Caravaggio, it is the elegance and poise of Raphael, stretched toward the overrefinement of such Emilian masters as Correggio and Parmigianino, that ultimately predominate.
In his idealized and sensuous figures, especially the nude male physiques that he evidently adored, Guido demonstrates his remarkable command of human anatomy. These works, such as his several versions of Saint Sebastian (c. 1615-19), his Samson Victorious (c. 1617), the Hercules series (1617-1620) and Nessus and Dejanira (1621), all captivate the viewer with their pictorial virtuosity.
Guido's draftsmanship and composition aim for a tenderness and delicacy that has nothing to do with narration. His dramas are drained of emotional intensity, transformed into decorative confections. His luxurious palette, too, is merely an ornamental ingredient. This primacy of the decorative impulse, rather than the dramatic one, distinguished the characteristic Mannerist preoccupation with eleganza.
Divided Opinion
Over the centuries, opinion has been divided between those who appreciate Guido's gentle manner and those two disdain the way it trivializes his subject matter. Many writers have objected to the apparent moral lassitude with which Guido painted his themes. Theophile Gautier wrote in 1867, "One should not expect here the austere expressing of Christian penitence but only a certain sentimental and coquettish melancholy such as beauties of the fashionable world may feel in certain hours of world-weariness." Guido's characters are gracefully posed, pristine, and angel-faced, regardless of the onerous situations in which they are frequently portrayed. Their expressions and demeanor can sometimes seem quite divorced from their circumstances.
The historian and aesthete Johann Joachim Winckelmann noted in 1763, for example, that Guido's Saint Michael the Archangel (1635) was thought inferior to other versions of the subject because it failed to imbue the archangel with an air appropriate to his action: "After having annihilated the enemy of God, [Guido's Michael] bends down over him without displaying wrath and with a serene and tranquil countenance." In Nathniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1859), a similar objection to the
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