Guido Reni in the Frankfurt Städel: Career leaps of a “divine”

Guido Reni got the hang of it. Lucretia, Cleopatra, Jesus, Peter – they all look up to heaven with such pity that one immediately feels pity for them. One is about to stab himself, the other holds the tongue of the serpent to his breast, the crucified one breathes his life out, his oldest disciple cannot believe that, as prophesied, out of cowardice he will become a liar before the third cockcrow has become.

Reni (1575 – 1642) prepared the perfect stage for all of them, whether ancient or biblical heroes, and presented them brilliantly: suffering, pleading, fading into beauty. This earned him the nickname “il Divino” during his lifetime, so divine was the Bolognese baroque master’s staging of his figures.

“Guido Reni, the divine” is also the title of the exhibition in the Städel, with which the great Italian is being honored in Germany for the first time in more than thirty years. Even then it was the people of Frankfurt who tried to help the “fallen angel of art history”, as director Philipp Demandt calls him, with a big show – at that time still in the Schirn.

Since then, the Städel has had a monumental new addition, an “Assumption of Mary” (around 1598/99) as an anniversary gift from the Friends of the Museum in 2014 to mark the 200th anniversary of the museum’s existence, plus a drawing previously attributed to Carracci, now as an authentic work by the master and the discovery that numerous of his works on paper are in the holdings of his own print room.

Unrecognized geniuses can easily be rediscovered with each generation, but Guido Reni doesn’t necessarily make it easy for the audience. The “Assumption of Mary” from the museum association in the first room is flanked by three other versions in small format, in which the Madonna – always in a red dress with a blue overrobe – first folds her hands devoutly, then spreads her arms and finally lifts them to heaven. So much fervor no longer has an uplifting effect today, but rather deters.

That was Guido Reni’s undoing when his Madonnas ended up in the hymn books of Catholic churchgoers in the form of pious inserts at the beginning of the 20th century. This decline into a devotionalist was not Reni’s fault, as it happened to him posthumously. The taste of the times just changed. Unlike his contemporaries Caravaggio and Rubens, little more remained of the popularity of the former superstar than the crossword puzzle: “Baroque painter with four letters, first name Guido”.

During the day he painted, at night he gambled away his fees

Of course that’s unfair. And so the artist’s defense of honor includes the narrative that Reni was a great guy. Fortunately, there is the biographer Carlo Cesare Malvaria, also called the Vasari of Bologna, who, according to the curator Bastian Eclercy, gave a fairly correct account of the artist’s biography in 1678. The painter must have been deeply religious as well as superstitious, had difficulties with women, but was all the more fond of his mother, for whom he returned to his hometown from Rome. During the day he pocketed enormous fees for his works, which he then gambled away again at night in dive bars.

A handwritten letter from 1628 in the first exhibition room testifies to his business acumen in the first exhibition room, in which he tells a “dear gentleman” why he has to pay so much for his paintings. As a “pittore un poco straordinario”, the artist counted himself in the third category, which may demand more accordingly. Cleverly, he let his clients – wealthy families in Bologna, the Borghese in Rome, the Duke of Mantua – set the fee themselves and thus forced them to exceed the usual market price in order to demonstrate their own connoisseurship.

How justified this self-confidence is is proven with every additional room, and one leaves the Städel converted. Alongside Caravaggio as the darling of today’s exhibition business, Reni grows into an equal protagonist. His talent was recognized early on in Bologna. Annibale Carracci does not like it at all when the young artist comes into the workshop of his cousin Ludovico. The formats are still small, Reni’s groping steps towards the first big act, an Ascension of the Virgin Mary, can be studied in a chalk drawing in which the figures on the paper are repeatedly shifted.

The next career step is the move to Rome, where Reni occasionally flirts with Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro paintings. The most beautiful example is the freshly restored “Christ on the Scourging Column” (around 1604) from the Städel inventory. The muscular Jesus, his six-pack flatteringly modulated by the light, emerges like an apparition from the darkness.

Sometimes David is a snot, sometimes an innocent boy

If it weren’t for the expression of suffering, one would delight in his flawless body. A visit to a Reni exhibition could be choreographed along nothing but fabulous male legs that shapely dominate the lower pictorial space.

Reni always impresses with his picture ideas. Sometimes David is a young prat who casually leans against a pillar and puts his hand on Goliath’s severed head like a trophy. Sometimes he is a boy who, with an innocent face, reaches out for the deadly sword blow while his knee rests on the giant lying on his stomach.

A particularly extravagant invention is his depiction of Samson after the defeat of the Philistines (c. 1615-17). With corpses lying all around, the beau rises against the cloudy sky, cloth flapping around his hips, and drinks water from a donkey’s jaw. The unusual work once hung above a fireplace in the Bolognese palazzo owned by the Zambeccari family. The artist had just returned to his hometown and had to reposition himself.

Reni is a brilliant painter, there’s no question about that. The exhibition also pays tribute to him as a draftsman and graphic artist. He himself saw the various media as equal. His painting “Allegory of the Harmony of Drawing and Painting” (around 1625) from the Louvre is emblematic of this.

The drawing is personified as a male figure, the first red chalk strokes on paper have already been made. The man places his hand encouragingly on the shoulder of the painting, which is depicted as a woman. On the other hand, she still looks reserved, hesitantly raising one hand to her breast while in the other she holds the palette with the colors that make up the picture itself: brown, red, yellow and white. Sanguine pencil and oil paint stand for the beginning of all art. Reni, the divine, mastered all means.

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