A virgin, a gambler and afraid of women, with a service made up only of men due to their fear of witchcraft and the possibility of being poisoned. Attached to his mother and devoted to the Virgin Mary, always immaculately dressed, in silk in summer and Spanish cloth in winter. Reserved, melancholic, elusive to praise, history would seat the great Bolognese master Guido Reni (1575-1642) on the couch of psychoanalysis centuries later.
This icon of the Baroque era with a classicist line would come to be labeled as homosexual and misogynist, although the curator of the spectacular exhibition that the Prado Museum now dedicates to him, with a hundred works from all over the world, including the cathedral of Notre Dame -Job’s Triumph, saved from the fire-, the New York Metropolitan and a Cleopatra lent by the brand new Carlos III, he believes that these are difficult theories to maintain.
For David García Cueto, head of Italian and French painting until 1800 at the Madrid art gallery, “it is a necessary debate but it makes a starting error, applying moral categories of the 21st century to that time. If the historical truth speaks, the stories and testimonies of the moment, in the 17th century, where the role of women was subordinated to the male, Guido Reni was considered by his contemporaries as an angelic being and had an idealized vision of women, strongly rooted in humanist culture, an idealization that comes from Petrarch”. And he adds that “we know that he decided not to have maids in his house and that all his staff were male, but in Bologna at the time there had been cases of lords being poisoned by his female servants.”
There is no doubt about his gambling with cards and dice, which led him, despite the high prices he awarded to the paintings that came out of his large workshop full of disciples, to paint insistently, accentuating a style in the end ” non finito”, not finished, of undone forms, due to the speed with which he drew them to enter money. A dematerialization that brings him closer to Titian.
There is also no doubt that he was able like few others to unite the human and the divine in his works before the viewer, with models of extreme beauty and perfection that could bring the viewer closer to a higher dimension, to the transcendent, even painting Christs of great physical beauty in which the divine soul could shine through.
It is not strange that Guido, who was influenced by Raphael and Caravaggio -as can be confirmed in an impressive David with the head of Goliath-, ended up being “the divine” himself, nor that the exhibition is closed by the angelic ephebe who extends his arms towards the sky of the painting Blessed Soul, which came from the Capitoline Art Gallery in Rome and is an allegory of the master and his work. A work that, as the director of the Prado, Miguel Falomir has recalled, has undergone very different evaluations in history: if in his time his glittering clientele could only be compared to that of Rubens, and his fame continued to shine long after his death In the 19th century, the artist and critic John Ruskin considered his neat and perfect style the height of evil and included him in “the school of errors and vices”. And in 1896 the Louvre would expel the Bolognese Baroque painters from its Grande Galerie.
Falomir recalls that “the history of art is not linear, nor is the history of the history of art, and few painters have known more ups and downs in their critical career than Reni, who fell into a critical ostracism in the 19th century from which only recovered late in the 20th century.
In this sense, he recalls that one of the masterpieces in the exhibition, Hipómenes y Atalanta -which can now be seen in its versions in the Prado and in Naples- arrived in Spain during the time of Philip IV and in the 19th century “was sent on deposit to Granada because it was believed that it lacks the aesthetic aptitudes to be hung in the Prado. It was only recovered in 1964. Today it embodies the tactile values ??of the Baroque, it is a painting that by itself encapsulates an aesthetic and an artistic movement”.
