Fig. 321. Guido Reni. Madonna with two Saints.
For the artist the work brought only chagrin. The Cardinal treated him with stinginess and personal spite. His irritation with his brother reached the explosive point. Agostino left him staggering under the weight of an ungrateful task, he fell into a dangerous melancholy, and in 1609 died miserably, leaving his helpers Albani and Domenichino to finish the gallery.
Of the followers of the Carracci, Guido Reni[[91]] (1575–1642) and Domenichino (1581–1641), are the most important. At his worst Guido Reni is the most repellant of sentimentalists, at his best a realist of the calibre of Ribera himself. In his time there are no grander old men than his, better painted or more fully realized as characters. You find them at their best in the Madonna of St. Paul, at Berlin, or the Immaculate Conception at Petrograd, or the Madonna with St. Jerome, in the Vatican, Figure [321]. It is hard to reconcile them with his sleek and cheaply seductive Magdalens, Cleopatras and Venuses. What steadies him in his inconsistency is a fine and simple sense of composition. He is lucid where his masters, the Carracci, tend to be confused. His taste is more coherent than his character. Under other conditions than those of academic Bologna and Papal Rome he might easily have become a realist of Zurbaran’s type. As it was, he undertook the usual synthesis of the grand style with the new sentimentality. Generally speaking he is neither grand nor sentimental enough, but superficial in both regards. Yet his discretion saves him in such works as the ceiling of the Villa Rospigliosi (1615) and the supremely elegant St. Michael, Figure [323], of the Cappucini. I like the Aurora, Figure [322], nay love it well this side of idolatry, for the same reason that I like Kipling’s lines
“An’ the dawn comes up like thunder
Outer China ’crost the bay.”
Both the fresco and the verses have the same pounding and obvious, yet thrilling cadences, both bring lyricism to the brink of bombast without letting it go over.
Fig. 322. Guido Reni. Aurora. Ceiling Fresco.—Casino Rospigliosi, Rome.
