Perhaps no artist was more highly esteemed or more successful in his time than Guido Reni (1575–1642). Over the centuries, the value of his paintings soared, until the fulsome expressiveness of Baroque art lost favor, and his style—especially as reified in his signature upturned heads of Christ or the Virgin and in half figures of the Magdalen or Cleopatra—turned into artistic cliché. Guido is one protagonist in this book; Carlo Cesare Malvasia, his biographer, is the other. In Malvasia's Felsina pittrice (1678), a two-volume work on the lives of the Bolognese painters, the context for Guido and his vast production takes shape. As a young man, Malvasia had known Guido as an elderly one and considered him a friend. In this new critical edition and translation of Malvasia's text, Lorenzo Pericolo explores Malvasia's ambivalence about narrating Guido's complicated artistic evolution, career, and personality.
Guido's career coincided with the explosion in Italy of an art market in the modern sense, and Malvasia marvels at its powerful effect. (Other have grappled with this phenomenon, notably Raffaella Morselli and Richard Spear, and new research on Federico Barrocci's practice sheds light on its beginnings.) Pericolo calls Guido a “money machine” (2:92). If Guido's brush was an instrument for creating exquisite paintings, it was also a gold mine producing a commodity that sold for lots of money, and this was something new. Guido cared deeply about his honor and showed disdain for money, but his gambling was out of control, and he needed money to pay his huge debts. Commissioned by popes and princes, he set no prices but instead maneuvered patrons into paying extraordinary sums commensurate with the honor of both parties and the quality of the painting. In a morning's work, Guido could dash off a couple of heads that would sell for as much as forty scudi, but then he would watch in frustration as the new owners sold them on for multiples of the price he had received. Malvasia offers ample evidence of Guido's production—or of the production of Guidos—reporting that he had between 150 and 200 pupils and assistants in scattered rented workshops where copies were made. Partly worked canvases were piled high in these veritable factories/warehouses. Recognizing that the finishing touches of his brush elevated the value of such canvases, Guido produced ritocchi by the score. Replete with drama, contradiction, and destructive tension, Malvasia's biography provides the context and explanation for the multitude of half figures, heads, and copies that blurred the contours of Guido's oeuvre in his own time and ever after.
A skilled translation of Malvasia's Life of Guido Reni is at the core of this very heavy pair of beautifully produced volumes, the first of which presents the original text printed on facing pages to the translation. The reader can instantly check a puzzling word or thought against the Italian and usually find a discussion of it in the notes. Perfect for scholars, the format also invites nonspecialists to read with ease an extraordinary life history. The biography itself is not long, but the annotations are detailed and expansive, more than three hundred pages in small font. They represent one of the most useful contributions of the book, offering detailed capsule accounts of theoretical and period concepts, and of patrons, artists, literati, friends, and associates. Though some names now can be searched online, the notes try to work out their relation to Guido. Notes clarify the nuances of references to Guido's teachers and mentors, Denys Calvaert and the Carracci, whose persistent yet inconsistent relationships were of the utmost importance to him. Guido worked in Rome, for the pope, and elsewhere in Italy, but he acted on a local Bolognese stage set by Malvasia for his beloved Carracci, cast collectively as the Messiah, to whom Guido played the role of the foremost evangelist (the others being Francesco Albani, Domenichino, and Guercino). Part 1 concludes with transcriptions of Malvasia's unpublished original notes, to the extent they have been preserved, since the larger part of them is lost.
Pericolo's essay opens the second part. Earlier scholars have written on Guido, most prominently Gian Carlo Cavalli and Stephen Pepper, but Pericolo's focus is Malvasia: his research, interpretation of documents, memory, and attitude toward his subject. Malvasia was confounded in the face of Guido's changing style, his maniera moderna, and his grace. He contends with inborn talent versus diligence, with the problem of Guido's unfinished works, and with the effects of reckless gambling on his production. Pericolo's interpretation is learned and perceptive, a provocation for further thought. Nearly a hundred pages of bibliography and a detailed index complete the publication. Malvasia's original book had only engraved portraits of the artists, but for this publication, an epic 358 illustrations, mainly in color, of virtually all known works by Guido have been assembled. Fresh photography gives visibility to paintings that have been poorly, rarely, or never previously reproduced. A smart decision was made to order the illustrations chronologically rather than as mentioned in the text, and to incorporate works not cited. The ganged illustrations thus constitute a kind of visual catalogue raisonné, making it possible to see the unfolding of Guido's artistic evolution.
Under the general editorship of Elizabeth Cropper, these two tomes are part of a monumental undertaking by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts to publish a translation, critical edition, and annotation of the entirety of Malvasia's Felsina pittrice. Sixteen volumes are projected; four are now in print, the first of which came out in 2012. The magnitude of work required to compile just the Guido Reni volumes—transcription, translation, archival research, citations, locating paintings, arranging photography, and obtaining permissions—is daunting. Pericolo and Cropper bore the lion's share of responsibility, but it took a team of senior and early career collaborators to carry out the work, and they are deservedly credited individually in the publication. If there is a typo or error in these impeccably edited and proofread volumes, this writer did not find it.
A pioneering exhibition in Bologna in 1954, with a catalogue by Cesare Gnudi and Gian Carlo Cavalli modestly illustrated in black and white, inaugurated modern scholarship on Guido. Pepper's catalogue raisonné of 1984 and various exhibition catalogues from the 1990s displayed more of Guido's artworks, some in color, so crucial for this artist. The new Malvasia volumes testify to the progress made over the last seven decades in the formats for publishing art historical research. These books may be the ne plus ultra in their handsome and lavish material production, designed to function for scholars who want to compare the original to the translated text, consult a note on a patron, or find bibliography, but they are pushing against the limits of the print medium. What next? It is hard to resist reimagining this content in a digital format that would sidestep the understandably steep price and the inevitably cumbersome materiality of two massive volumes occupying most of one's desk, with multiple bookmarks deployed throughout. Instead of being accessible mainly in libraries (or inaccessible for several months as of this writing, due to the COVID-19 pandemic), researchers could consult all of Malvasia on a digital device, navigating with ease across the various parts.
For now, however, and for a very long time, these superb volumes on Malvasia's Life of Guido Reni, and the others that constitute the larger project, will serve as a benchmark for ambitious research and unimpeachable scholarship, providing all who are interested in early modern art history a resource of the highest value.
