anatomy class in Prado

We can start with the most spicy: the San Sebastian in Guido Reni (1575-1642) is considered an icon of gay eroticism, as Oscar Wilde I will dedicate a poem to him and then Yukio Mishima, in a famous photographic recreation, became the martyr himself. The saint's version Prado Museum It was recently restored and here we see it without the repainting that Isabel de Farnese he commanded, to spread the cloth of purity. We can start like this not only as a hook for the distracted reader and the perusing reader, but with all common sense, because if something catches the attention of anyone who passes by the Bolognese painter's canvases, it is your mastery when it comes to painting your body.

Reni's glorious anatomies made him deserve the denomination of divine, because he was capable of creating beauty and a beauty so sublime that it put the viewer in contact with the transcendent. This issue of the representation of physical beauty is one of the axes that make up the exhibition. The other three are the biographical tour; its links with Spain, both its presence in collections and its influence on our artists; and, finally, the dialogue between painting and sculpture, in both directions.

[The monumental painting by Guido Reni that was saved from the fire of Notre Dame arrives at the Museo del Prado]

I must say that this is a great exhibition and a great exhibition. It occupies 900 square meters and brings together almost one hundred pieces. Some of these loans, in fact, are exceptional, such as The slaughter of the innocentof the Pinacoteca in Bologna, or Job's Triumphof Notre-Dame Cathedral (one is the first time it has left the museum and the other is the institution's most valuable painting).

You can also see together for the first time both versions of Hippomenes and Atalanta (del Prado and Naples). That painting that is one of my favorites of all time, with two beautiful nudes moving quickly in opposite directionswhose kinetic energy is about to remove them from the scene, leaving behind the tenuous cloths that (do not) cover them.

It would be best to learn a brief biography of the painter before continuing with the exhibition. At the age of nine, he joined the Flemish painter's workshop as an apprentice. Dennis Calvaert. At the age of twenty, he moved to a rival workshop, the one the Carracci named the Accademia degli Incamminati. twenty-five and beyond Annibale Carracci He moved to Rome, where he spent a decade painting frescoes (the one at the Casino dell'Aurora is considered his masterpiece).

He traveled to Naples where he lived for a few years and from 1613 settled almost permanently in Bologna. Although historiography attributes to him an anti-mannerist bias and pure classicism, his admiration for caravaggio, whom he knew and treated. He created a workshop whose production had to be abundant, as his love for the game put him increasingly in debt. It is well known that he died a virgin, but in any case he was misogynistic and perhaps homosexual (at the time it was a strictly persecuted sin).

Reni has always known that skills are not innate, but rather the result of enormous effort to learn to master the craft

The sample is divided into 11 sections and begins with your formative years. Great draftsman and engraver, a small painting entitled The Union of Drawing and Color underlines how well he was aware of the ingredients of good painting. Reni has always known that skills are not innate, but the result of enormous effort to learn to master the craft. His arrival in Rome meant get to know directly the legacy of classical antiquitybut also the painting of harmonious Rafael and the excessive Miguel Angel. David with the head of Goliath Is it from that time and I give up describing the ironic, thunderous? contrast between the jovial David and the titan's bestial head. He also painted until then The slaughter of the innocentso tragic and theatrical.

In the chapter “The beauty of the divine body” those impressive anatomies to which I referred appear. We can see a sparkling Saint John the Baptist and an athletic Jesus tied to the pillar. The small sculpture of Alessandro Algardiin gilded bronze, it copies the aforementioned Jesus and is the first testimony to Reni's importance as a model for contemporary artists.

The “Heroes and Gods of Supernatural Anatomy” section is actually a sample of bodybuilding. Reni paints hypermuscular Hercules and Phaethon, undoubtedly inspired by torso lookout, present in a plaster mold. He Hercules in zurbaranpainted for the Alcázar of Madrid, reminds us, on the other hand, that mythology was put at the service of the imagination of monarchies. Along with all these bodies, whose physical splendor is predictable, those grouped under the title “The power of the saints and beautiful old age” draw attention.

A successful title, because it's worth seeing the nobility with which the ravages of time are represented, with shadows and folds in a flesh that the saints show, I don't know if very necessarily. But it is necessary to remember that this anatomical beauty was not an aesthetic objective in itself, but rather the means of making visible the moral and spiritual values of its owners. The same can be said, of course, of “Mary or the humanized divinity”, where we find a immaculate by Reni commissioned by Philip IVwhich was in the cathedral of Seville and served as a model for the well-known immaculate in Murillo.

The last chapter is surprising: it corresponds to his last years and shows hastily painted paintings, some visibly unfinished, certainly stimulated by their economic needs. The blurred contours and muted colors convey, perhaps unintentionally, a similar dematerialization to which gongorahis contemporary, described it in an insurmountable way: we will end up transformed into “smoke, dust, shadows, nothing”.

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