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Guido responded-after having also made him understand that His Excellency should deign to calm himself and refrain from further actions-that when the painting was finished he would let him know. The ambassador becoming frenzied sent to find out how long he would be. On his arrival Guido retired into another room with the intention of having him told that he was not at home.
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Everyday the ambassador sent someone, and sometimes he came without fanfare in person to speed up the work. Full of international intrigue, Malvasia’s account is worth presenting in full: "At the request of the Spanish ambassador, Guido, when he was in Rome, had undertaken to paint for the Infante of Spain a Blessed Virgin of the Immaculate Conception appearing between two angels. Because of the idealization in the faces, the cool hues of the draperies and clouds, the golden glow of the heavens, and the porcelain-like treatment of skin tones, the work has been considered one of the prime early examples of what the seventeenth-century Bolognese biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia referred to as Reni’s "secondo maniera," or second manner, in which a blond tonality and delicacy replace the more strongly modeled forms of his "first manner." The Commission: The work’s harmonious balance and assured coolness contrast notably with the acrimonious conflict surrounding its commission. Conceived as a heavenly vision, on the model of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (then in the church of San Sisto, Piacenza, and now in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), the work was painted in 1627, during a brief return to Rome to execute frescoes for St. Wearing her traditional pink robe and blue mantle, the Virgin is crowned by a circle of twelve stars. Their upward gaze was a signature of Reni’s, indebted to Raphael’s Saint Cecilia, a work in Bologna feverishly studied by local artists. Seen against a golden aura, or mandorla, bordered by ethereal heads of putti (cherubim), she stands on a crescent moon perched atop three heads of putti and is adored by two angels, who gaze at her in rapturous reverence. The Picture: The Met’s Immaculate Conception is a prime example of Reni’s celebrated depictions of the Virgin, with her upturned head and eyes directed toward heaven, her flawless features expressive of her purity, her hands devoutly joined in prayer, and the elegant inflection of her pose. Despite a brief early phase in Rome when he experimented with the dramatic tenebrism of his archrival Caravaggio, Reni secured his great fame as a painter of beautiful and harmonious religious and mythological scenes and of devotional images of the Virgin Mary. An infamously prickly artist, he was plagued by a gambling habit and could barely keep up with his debts or the constant demand for paintings. In 1613 Reni returned to Bologna, where he set up a prolific workshop. Around 1602, Reni went to Rome, where by 1608 he had achieved great success, obtaining important commissions from Cardinal Emilio Sfondrato, Pope Paul V, and the Pope’s nephew Cardinal Scipione Borghese, for whom he painted his renowned Aurora.
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In the Carracci academy, Reni would have been exposed to the study of nature, the antique, the high Renaissance exemplars of Michelangelo and Raphael, and the painters of northern Italy such as Correggio and Parmigianino.
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Born in Bologna in 1575, Guido Reni first apprenticed in the studio of the Flemish Mannerist Denys Calvaert (1540–1619) before moving to study with the Carracci family of painters. In an influential book published in 1997, Richard Spear (see References) gives a modern deconstruction of Reni’s art, his complex and contradictory character (he was an inveterate gambler, deeply religious, and had an ambivalent sexuality), and his fame. His fame made him a prime target of John Ruskin’s assault on Baroque painting and his reputation has never recovered. His Aurora, frescoed in 1614 on the vault of a loggia (the Casino dell’Aurora) in Rome, was one of the most famous works of the western canon, reproduced in thousands of engravings and photographs. Such has been the lasting impact of the transformations of taste that attended the political and cultural revolutions of the nineteenth century (for which, see the classic study by Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art, 1976) that it is difficult now to comprehend the extent of his fame. He was seen not only as the inheritor of the legacy of Raphael, whose altarpiece of Saint Cecilia in Bologna was a major source of inspiration, but of the ancient painter Apelles. His art, with its emphasis on an ideal of abstract, feminine beauty-epitomized by the Renaissance concepts of grace ("grazia") and delicately expressive heads ("arie di teste")-earned him the epithet of "divino," or divine. The Artist: One of the most celebrated as well as highly paid painters of his day, with a European reputation that rivaled that of Peter Paul Rubens (1575–1640), Reni is one of the defining figures of European painting.