Painter of the Bible
Guido Reni
Guido Reni was the most celebrated Bolognese painter of the seventeenth century and one of the principal voices of the Italian Baroque.
Life & work
Guido Reni was the most celebrated Bolognese painter of the seventeenth century and one of the principal voices of the Italian Baroque. Born in Bologna in 1575, trained in the workshop of the Flemish painter Denis Calvaert before moving in his late teens to the Carracci academy founded by Ludovico, Annibale, and Agostino Carracci, he absorbed both Northern technical care and the Carracci program of restoring grand-manner figure painting on classical and biblical subjects. He worked extensively in Rome between 1601 and 1614, and then returned to Bologna where he ran the leading workshop in northern Italy until his death in 1642.
His Aurora ceiling fresco in the Casino dell'Aurora at the Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi in Rome (1614) made him famous across Europe. In Christian art his reputation rests on a long sequence of devotional and biblical pictures: the Crucifixion of Saint Peter (Vatican Pinacoteca, 1604–1605), the Massacre of the Innocents (Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, 1611), the Atalanta and Hippomenes for a Neapolitan client and the related Saint Sebastian images now in Genoa, Madrid, and the Capitoline, and an entire corpus of Madonnas, Ecce Homos, Mater Dolorosas, and penitent Magdalenes that became, by repetition and engraving, the standard visual vocabulary of Italian Counter-Reformation devotion.
His late style — grayer, more spectral, the paint thinned almost to the gesso — was once treated as a sign of decline; today it is understood as a deliberate move toward an inward, almost spectral pictorial register that influenced eighteenth-century devotional painting from Naples to Vienna. His Saint Michael Archangel (Santa Maria della Concezione, Rome, 1635) is among the most engraved religious images of the entire seventeenth century.
He never married, lived modestly despite enormous earnings, and gave away most of his money — to gambling and to charity in roughly equal measure. He was buried in the church of San Domenico in Bologna.
