The "Divine" Guido: Religion, Sex, Money and Art in the World of Guido Reni. - Review - book review

RICHARD E SPEAR

novel Haven: Yale University Press, 1997 430 pp; 39 color ills., 134 b/w $65

upon the cover of Richard Spear's The "Divine" Guido single sees a virginal Hippomenes shoving Atalanta not on the page, over the spine, and onto the back overlay Positioned in between his leg just below his indiscreetly masked genitalia is the title. Before reading The "Divine" Guido I had not given replete attention to how the lovely

Atalanta is being cold-shouldered by dint of Hippomenes, taking this merely as an example of Reni's stony ideal of classicism or possibly as an example of his aversion to engage the erotica of Ovid. After reading Spear's delightful volume however, this frigid erotic collision suddenly becomes more complicated and more vivid, not because Spear takes a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of time discussing this particular painting (it slips by means of in three short paragraphs) on the contrary because he transformed my perception of Reni and his work in general. Having learned about Reni's fear of physicality--his high horizontal of hygiene, his virginity, his misogyny, and his embarrassment above obscenities and dirty jokes--it is impossible to diocese Atalanta and Hippomenes in the same way. on a sudden Reni starts popping up everywhere in his work in unexpect guises--here as Hippomenes, there as the undiscovered viewer of suicidal Cleopatras--never as a psychological automaton on the contrary instead as an elusive neighborhood speaking within the conventions of Baroque culture

The "Divine" Guido is an unconventional and completely refreshing biography that unravels the knotty thickets of Guido Reni's sexual, artistic, and religious lives. Almost all other monographs upon Italian Baroque artists, including Spear's be in possession of landmark Domenichino, take as their epistemological goal the explanation of individual paintings, their dating and attribution, their iconography, their patrons, and their sitings. With The "Divine" Guido, Spear gives us instead a more render free of access history of the social, intellectual, and psychological conditions of making and viewing paintings. In a series of evocatively intersecting studies that range from gambling to marketing to sex he reveals the tricky contingencies of life and art, character and creativity. Having written the definitive monograph upon the deliberative and principled Domenichino, Spear now takes upon a deeply intuitive artist who was uncomfortable with theory and driven through psychological tensions. Spear adapts his approach and topics accordingly by the agency of revealing the mutual dependencies of art and psyche without, however, reducing Reni's art to simple causations or simplifying the mysteries and contradictions of human character. Because art is as composed of several elements as people, the standard questions of intentionality that bedevil with equal reason many other monographs on artists are recast as multivalent readings contingent upon the gender, personality, education, birthplace, religion, and thus on, of the reader/viewer. Reception theory has borne profitable fruit here. Spear invites diverse replications by including many voices, not just those that you would wait for (Reni's contemporaries and art historians), on the other hand also a fascinating array of others (the marquis de Sade, Rembrandt Peale, Oscar Wilde, Yukio Mishima). He disavows "an intentionalist's reliance to pin down Reni's 'real motives,'" and in with equal reason doing grants him the complexity of humanity and, similarly, advises on the viewer a comparable latitude.

The cloying "Divine" of this book's title entreats up the kind of gushy and trite response-"My dear, he is simply divine"--that plagued Reni's reputation as a serious artist for for a like reason many modern viewers. It is an intentionally annoying title designed to rouse memories of Reni's saccharine Madonnas and anodyne saints, all prolifically procreated. The distancing quotation marks around "divine," however, signal another, more historicized reading: they inform us of Reni's exalted status in the 17th century; they call up the conceit of the artist as divine creator; they confirm a neuter sex life; they promise (and deliver) a first-name familiarity with the artist. The portrait Spear paints of the "divine" Guido is vivid and compelling. Vain, suspicious, insecure, misogynist, obsessive, and phobic, Reni can be as unendearing for us as he must have been for his tormented studio assistants and collaborators. Remarkably, Spear captures the interconnected flow of these characteristics, renders his subdue sympathetic and believable, and allows his readers to envision their have Reni. With The "Divine" Guido we are introduced to a real and true complex person whose activities as lover (or abstainer), as art marketeer, as thinker, as believer, and as studio plague affected his activity as an artist.

Many art historians proffer to cordon off the different domains of sex religion, and money; Spear asks by what mode they cross-pollinated. Impressive results have been attained by the agency of many scholars who thematized sex religion, and circulating medium as, for example, the fetishized gaze, the ecstatic vision, or art as commodity, on the other hand the results have also been sometimes one-dimensional and self-reflective. We might well attend to the Renaissance maxim "every painter paints himself" as we recreate artists in our hold self-images. Titian, in Erwin Panofsky's mind, became a learned iconographer smooth though he needed regular epistolary help; and Caravaggio, the self-fashioned iconoclast, is transformed into a diligent learner of ancient and Renaissance art. Spear averts this danger first by the agency of disclosing his own personal interests and then by the agency of trying to meet Reni upon his own terms. The "Divine" Guido is premised upon the belief, entirely convincing to me that Reni had a mingled array of psychological needs and behavioral solutions for dealing with his world, and that his art was at one time a product of those straits and solutions as well as an essential constituting that shaped them. We have here a historically turfed study that helps to erase historical distance for the reader, a living Guido that is not dehistoricized for the sake of accessibility on the contrary instead is subtly contextualized in his time.