Around 1602, Reni went to Rome, where by 1608 he had achieved great success, obtaining important commissions from Cardinal Emilio Sfondrato, Pope Paul V, and the Pope’s nephew Cardinal Scipione Borghese, for whom he painted his renowned Aurora. ![]() In the Carracci academy, Reni would have been exposed to the study of nature, the antique, the high Renaissance exemplars of Michelangelo and Raphael, and the painters of northern Italy such as Correggio and Parmigianino. Born in Bologna in 1575, Guido Reni first apprenticed in the studio of the Flemish Mannerist Denys Calvaert (1540–1619) before moving to study with the Carracci family of painters. In an influential book published in 1997, Richard Spear (see References) gives a modern deconstruction of Reni’s art, his complex and contradictory character (he was an inveterate gambler, deeply religious, and had an ambivalent sexuality), and his fame. His fame made him a prime target of John Ruskin’s assault on Baroque painting and his reputation has never recovered. His Aurora, frescoed in 1614 on the vault of a loggia (the Casino dell’Aurora) in Rome, was one of the most famous works of the western canon, reproduced in thousands of engravings and photographs. Such has been the lasting impact of the transformations of taste that attended the political and cultural revolutions of the nineteenth century (for which, see the classic study by Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art, 1976) that it is difficult now to comprehend the extent of his fame. He was seen not only as the inheritor of the legacy of Raphael, whose altarpiece of Saint Cecilia in Bologna was a major source of inspiration, but of the ancient painter Apelles. His art, with its emphasis on an ideal of abstract, feminine beauty-epitomized by the Renaissance concepts of grace ("grazia") and delicately expressive heads ("arie di teste")-earned him the epithet of "divino," or divine. The Artist: One of the most celebrated as well as highly paid painters of his day, with a European reputation that rivaled that of Peter Paul Rubens (1575–1640), Reni is one of the defining figures of European painting.
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