Guido Reni Paintings

Guido Reni Painting for Sale >>s

Oil Painting Supplies of 350 Famous Painters * Oil Painting Supplies of 150 Styles

Knowledge: Oil Painting * Acrylic Painting * Watercolor Painting * Gouache Painting * Asian Ink Art
Pastel Painting * Charcoal Drawing * Pencil Sketch * Wax Crayon Painting

Toperfect supply oil painting masterpiece reproductions of the old
master Guido Reni, you are welcome to send us your own Guido Reni pictures to copy.

The copyright of scripts in this website is owned by Toperfect. Toperfect reserves the manual scripts of original version. Toperfect will take appropriate legal action in the piracy and infringements of copyright.

Biography of Guido Reni

Italian Baroque artist
born 1575 - died 1642
Student of: Denys Calvaert (1540-1619), Agostino Carracci(1557-1602), Lodovico Carracci(1555-1619).
Friend of: Francesco Albani (1578-1660).
Influence on: Guido Cagnacci (1601-1663)

Italian painter of popular religious paintings and critically acclaimed mythological scenes. Guido Reni was born in Bologna and began to study painting at the age of nine; he joined the Carracci Academy when he was 20. His studies were rounded off by a trip to Rome in about 1600. From that moment on, antique and recent Guido Reni art became his ideals. He admired Raphael unconditionally. He did, however, come to terms with Caravaggio's naturalism in a group of youthful paintings such as The Crucifixion of St Peter in the Vatican Gallery (1604), where the use of chiaroscuro provided enormous energy.

His success was underlined by the important commissions Guido Reni received. They included the cycle of The Labors of Hercules (1617-21) that the artist painted for the Duke of Mantua and which are now in the Louvre. He exalted the clarity of light, the perfection of the body, and lively colour. Toward the end of his life, Reni modified his style. Guido Reni paintings became so airy as to seem insubstantial and were almost completely black and white. He also used long, flowing brushstrokes and conveyed an atmosphere laden with intense melancholy.

Guido Reni was a quintessentially classical academic but he was also one of the most elegant artists in the annals of art history. He was constantly seeking an absolute, rarefied perfection which the painter measured against classical Antiquity and Raphael. Because of this, over the years the Bolognese painter has been in and out of fashion, depending on the tastes of the times. The eighteenth century loved him, the nineteenth century, persuaded by the violent criticism of John Ruskin, hated him. But even his detractors cannot deny the exceptional technical quality of Guido Reni painting nor the clarity of his supremely assured and harmonious brushwork.

A renowned his religious painting, the story of " Callisto and Diana," had been completed before he left.

The character of Guido Reni art is so well known as hardly to call for detailed analysis, beyond what we have already intimated. His most characteristic style exhibits a prepense ideal, of form rather than character, with a slight mode of handling, and silvery, somewhat cold, colour. In working from the girl body he aimed at perfection of form, especially marked in the hands and feet. But the Baroque artist was far from always going to choice nature for his model; he transmuted ad libitum, and painted, it is averred, a Magdalene of demonstrative charms from a vulgar-looking colour-grinder. Best Guido Reni paintings have beauty, great amenity, artistic feeling and high accomplishment of manner, all alloyed by a certain core of commonplace; in the worst Guido Reni paintings the commonplace swamps everything, and Guido has flooded European galleries with trashy and empty pretentiousness, all the more noxious in that its apparent grace of sentiment and form misleads the unwary into approval, and the dilettante dabbler into cheap raptures. The identity of the last-named portrait is very dubious; it certainly cannot have been painted direct from Beatrice, who had been executed in Rome before Guido ever resided there.. Many etchings are attributed to him - some from Guido Reni paintings, and some after other masters; they are spirited, but rather negligent.

Of other Guido Reni art not already noticed, the following should be named: - in Rome (the Vatican), the " Crucifixion of St Peter," an example of the painter's earlier manner; in S. Lorenzo in Lucina, " Christ Crucified "; in Forll, the " Conception "; in Bologna, the " Alms of St Roch " (early), the " Massacre of the Innocents," and the " Pieta, or Lament over the Body of Christ " (in the church of the Mendicanti), which is by many regarded as Guido's prime executive work; in the Dresden Gallery, an " Ecce Homo "; in Milan (Brera Gallery), "Saints Peter and Paul"; in Genoa (church of S. Ambrogio), the " Assumption of the Virgin "; in Berlin, " St Paul the Hermit and St Anthony in the Wilderness."

The celebrated picture of " Fortune (in the Capitol) is one of Reni's finest treatments of female form; as a specimen of male form, the " Samson Drinking from the Jawbone of an Ass " might be named beside it. One of his latest Baroque works of mark is the " Ariadne," which used to be in the Gallery of the Capitol. The Louvre contains twenty of Guido Reni paintings, the National Gallery of London seven, and others were once there, now removed to other public collections. The most interesting of the seven is the small " Coronation of the Virgin," painted on copper, an elegantly finished Guido Reni art, more pretty than beautiful. It was probably painted before the master quitted Bologna for Rome.
For the life and Guido Reni painting, see Bolognini, Vita di Guido Reni (1839); Passeri, Vite de' pittori; and Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice; also Lanzi, Storia pittorica. (W. M. R.) Guido Reni: Il pittore nacque a Bologna nel 1575 e scomparve nella stessa città natale nel 1642. Reinterpretazione di Caravaggio Allievo dapprima di D. Calvaert, poi dell'accademia carraccesca degli Incamminati. Nel decennio tra il 1598 e il 1608, a Roma e a Bologna, passò dalla rimeditazione sul manierismo e su Raffaello a una interpretazione in chiave classicamente naturalistica del realismo caravaggesco.

Importanti commissioni La protezione di Scipione Borghese gli procurò una serie di importanti commissioni a Roma da parte del pontefice PaoloV: l'artista attese dunque alla decorazione di due sale in Vaticano, delle cappelle di S. Andrea e di S. Silvia in S. Gregorio Magno al colle Celio, della Cappella Paolina in S. Maria Maggiore. Dipinse in questi anni la "Strage degli Innocenti" e la "Aurora". Ritornato definitivamente nella città natale nel 1614, arricchì il suo linguaggio figurativo di note altamente retoriche nella "Gloria di S. Domenico" per l'omonima chiesa bolognese, e di tonalità più calde d'influsso neoveneto, mentre una vena di classicismo si esprime in "Atalanta e Ippomene" e nel "Battesimo di Cristo". Fu autore di un folto gruppo di opere con soggetto religioso "Estasi di S. Andrea Corsini" e "Crocifissione". Strutture più libere Nella fase ultima dell'attività del Reni le forme del classicismo sembrano cedere a un impulso interiore che si esprime in nuove e più libere strutture compositive ad esempio "Lucrezia" e "Cleopatra".

Calvenzano, actual Italia, 1575-Bolonia, 1642) Pintor italiano. Se formó con Calvaert y en 1593 ingresó en la Academia de los Carracci, de los que heredó el amor por la pintura de Rafael y por el clasicismo en general, rasgos que se acentuaron tras sus visitas a Roma. Después de una primera etapa, corta, de fuertes influencias caravaggiescas en los acentuados contrastes de luces y sombras, evolucionó hacia un barroco de raíz academicista, basado en la claridad del dibujo, la composición con movimiento y plana y la idealización de las figuras. Trabajó en Roma, donde decoró al fresco la bóveda del Casino Rospiglioso (La aurora, su obra más famosa), en Nápoles y en Bolonia, donde tuvo un taller que gozó de prestigio en toda Europa. Se dedicó sobre todo a la temática religiosa y mitológica y gozó de un prestigio considerable.