Guido Reni was a pupil of Denys Calvaert in Bologna and, like Domenichino and Francesco Albani, transferred in 1595 from the studio of the Flemish artist to the Carracci’s Accademia degli Incamminati. His earliest major work, a Coronation of the Virgin painted in 1595 and now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna, shows the influence of both Calvaert and the Carracci. A number of altarpiece commissions for churches in and around Bologna followed before Reni moved to Rome in 1601. He remained there for some thirteen years and received several important commissions; unlike Albani and Domenichino, however, he did not join the Roman workshop of the Annibale Carracci. Among Reni’s most important Roman works were the decoration of the chapel of the Annunciation in the Palazzo Quirinale, painted in 1610, and the ceiling fresco of the Triumph of Aurora for the Villa Borghese, completed in 1614. Reni returned to Bologna that year and was soon established as the city’s leading painter and the dominant figure in local artistic circles. Among the important works of this period are four large scenes from the legend of Hercules painted between 1617 and 1621 for Ferdinando Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua; these are now in the Louvre. In the late years of his career, his painting style became looser and broader with figures of a somewhat ethereal quality.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Reni does not seem to have made much effort to preserve his drawings and only around two hundred sheets survive today. His biographer Cesare Malvasia notes that the artist tended to leave his drawings lying around his studio where anyone could take them, and that at his death large groups of sketches were sold for minimal sums. The largest extant group of drawings by Reni, numbering around fifty sheets, is in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.
This large and animated head study is a working drawing, with slight differences, for the Saint Petronius appearing in one of the artist’s most famous commissions, the votive standard or banner known as the Pala della Peste, now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna (2). Other drawings related to the composition are at Christ Church, Oxford (inv.0528): a comparably fine head study for the soldier Saint Proculus (3); and in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid: a half length figure study preparatory for the St Ignatius Loyola (4). The drawing at Christ Church belonged to Padre Resta and bears the customary form of inventory number: e.80.. It is described in Richardson’s transcription of the Resta catalogue (the Lansdowne manuscript MS 802, in the British Museum) as: Guido S. Proco nel famoso Stendardo della Citta di Bologna. Tantalizingly, the succeeding number, e.81 is listed as a S. Petronio but, since no Resta number is visible on the present sheet it can only be suggested that the two drawings have a shared provenance.
The use of coloured chalk in this drawing is particularly unusual in Reni’s work. The head studies are more commonly executed in red, black and white. Here, the red and yellow chalk shading is applied and then stumped in a painterly manner as if to block out areas of lighter and darker coloration. Details of the ears, mouth and eyes are picked out with harder accents of red chalk. In describing this study, Catherine Johnston, who will include it in her forthcoming catalogue raisonne of Reni drawings, remarked particularly on the 'vitality' of execution ‘indicative of the master’s hand’ and compared it with other head studies of this later period such as that for the Sant’ Andrea Corsini in the Louvre (inv.8900) (5). A drawing at Windsor, of the same head, is considered to be a copy after the painting by both Catherine Johnston and Veronika Birke (6); in small details such as the Saint’s hairline and the shape of the mouth, the copy is closer to the finished painting than to the present preparatory study. Few documents relating to the commission survive and thus the present drawing and the two others mentioned above, are precious records of the project’s hurried evolution.
The Pala della Peste was commissioned from Reni, in the face of a devastating plague, to be a symbol of Bologna’s devotion to the Madonna and her Saints and to act as a plea for their intercession. The plague is recorded to have entered the city on 6 May 1630 and six months later roughly one quarter of the population had died from it. On 2 August the city Senate swore a solemn vow offering acts of collective piety to the Madonna of the Rosary, Francis Xavier and Ignatius of Loyola. This act expressed the desperation of a community witnessing the horrors of a disease they understood as an expression of God’s wrath. Chosen by the senators as the foremost painter in the city, Reni was asked to complete the banner in time for a public procession to be held on 27 December that same year, the feast of St John the Evangelist. Reni chose silk as the support for this massive banner or 'pallione', presumably for its light weight, although a story from Malvasia is often recounted in this context. The artist is said to have been convinced of that material’s strength and resilience after having witnessed the exhumation of a Roman body. On the instant the tomb was opened, both the skeleton and its linen shirt disintegrated leaving only the silk toga intact. The banner was to be carried at head height and reaches nearly four metres high. Reni filled the lowest part of this dignified and moving composition with a grim depiction of the city which would have been clearly visible to the processors and the gathered crowds. It shows the city walls, with prominent monuments and churches visible beyond. The scene is filled with the tiny figures of desperate onlookers watching the sick and dead being carried away. Above, is a heavenly vision of the Madonna and Child seated upon a rainbow, to which all eyes are guided by the earnest, interceding hands and expressions of Bologna’s patron saints, who are assembled beneath her: Petronius (who is given precedence as the city’s most venerated patron), Francis of Assisi and Francis Xavier, Dominic, Ignatius of Loyola, Florian and Proculus. Following its wintry presentation to the citizens at a time when the destructive power of the plague was beginning to wane, Reni’s life-affirming standard was carried through Bologna’s streets annually, warding off death for the next one hundred and fifty years until, deemed too precious to be moved, a copy was commissioned from Pier Francesco Cavazza to be carried in its place (7).
Notes
1. Information given in a letter written by Catherine Johnston dated 5 March 2007; the author having seen the drawing in a private German collection and studied photographs thereafter.
2. Stephen Pepper, Guido Reni, Oxford 1984, p.266, cat.135.
3. Reni’s head study for St. Proculus, see James Byam Shaw, Drawings by Old Masters at Christ Church, Oxford, Oxford 1976, cat.966.
4. See Veronika Birke, Guido Reni, Zeichnungen, exhib. Cat., Vienna, Albertina, 1981, cat. 120, (in other citations the drawing is mistakenly said to be in the Real Academia di San Fernando), the St. Proculus head is also illustrated here as fig.58.
5. In the letter dated 5 March 2007 (see note 1). For an illustration of the Sant’ Andrea Corsini see Catherine Johnston, The Drawings of Guido Reni, PHD dissertation, 1974, p.191, cat.164.
6. See Otto Kurz, Bolognese Drawings of the XVII and XVIII Century in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, .., Bologna 1955, cat.351.
7. For the information on Reni’s commission and background history see Catherine R. Puglisi, 'Guido Reni’s Pallione del Voto and the Plague of 1630', Art Bulletin, vol.77, no.3, pp.402-412.
