Alessandro Farnese (this, one must remember, was before he became pope, though it is unlikely that his proclivities changed much after his election to the Fisherman’s Chair) decreed that its subject should be the Power of Love, and earthly rather than divine love at that. To call such a theme inappropriate for a future pontiff would be a mistake: he had been made cardinal by the Borgia Pope Alexander VI, whose mistress was Alessandro Farnese’s sister, Giulia Farnese. Moreover, he had four illegitimate children of his own, plus an unknown number of by-blows.
Thus Annibale Carracci set out, with tremendous zeal and brio, to cover the twenty-meter barrel vault with frescoes representing the Triumph of Love as symbolized by the cavortings of Bacchus and Ariadne—a surging, tumbling apparition of scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a veritable firmament of classical flesh, anchored in references to Raphael’s Loggia Farnesina and the ignudi of Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling, but as pagan as the art of painting could imaginably be. Annibale, a superb draftsman, was one of the greatest reinventors of the nude body that has ever existed, and the Farnese ceiling is virtually the last full-strength appearance of the classical impulse, at its outer boundaries of ambition, in Italian art. If one wants to see the other extreme of Annibale Carracci’s work, it, too, is in Rome, in the Galleria Colonna: the much earlier and more social-realist portrait of a worker tucking into his lunch of beans and onions, while clutching a bread roll and returning your gaze with a glare of feral possessiveness, mouth open, frayed straw hat on: The Bean Eater (c. 1583). It, too, is a masterpiece, though of a very different sort. Presumably it would be difficult, for today’s dinner guests in their fracs, glancing up from their plates of foie gras en gelée Lucullus at the tumultuous joys of gods on the embassy ceiling, to connect the two. It is sad to know that Farnese paid Annibale Carracci so stingily for his four years’ inspired labor on the Farnese ceiling that the artist slid into depression, took to the bottle, and died at the early age of forty-nine, reduced at last (one supposes) to eating beans.
The other major Bolognese artist working in Rome in the first part of the seventeenth century was Guido Reni (1575–1642). There can be few painters in history whose careers show such a spectacular rise to the heights of reputation, followed by such a plunge to the depths. For more than a century after his death, connoisseurs, tourists, and other artists considered him to have been angelically inspired, as famous, in his way, as Michelangelo, Leonardo, or (for that matter) Picasso. Percy Bysshe Shelley, who died in Italy, thought that if some cataclysm overwhelmed Rome, the loss of Raphael and Guido Reni would “be alone regretted.” Unquestioned geniuses, such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini, thought he painted “pictures of Paradise” and took his work for a model, and other artists were unstinting in their praise. As well they might have been: as his allegorical frescoes in the Palazzo Rospigliosi-Pallavicini in Rome, such as the Raphaelesque Aurora (1614), amply demonstrate, Reni at his infrequent best had an exquisite sense of style. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, his big altarpiece of the Trinity in Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini was considered one of the sights of Rome, a mandatory spectacle for the serious young artist. But by 1846, in Modern Painters, John Ruskin was attributing to Reni “a taint and a stain, and jarring discord … marked sensuality and impurity.” Fifty years later, Bernard Berenson declared, “We turn away from Guido Reni with disgust unspeakable”—not that it took so very much to disgust that severe and fussy aesthete. The nadir was reached fifty years after that, when you could easily get a ten-foot Reni (if you wanted it, which few did) for under three hundred dollars at auction.
What happened? A tectonic shift in taste. The Victorians did not mind sentimental high-mindedness, just as long as it was not hypocritical, and hypocrisy was the charge made, more and more often, against Guido after his death. He was proud, he said, of being able to “paint heads with their eyes uplifted a hundred different ways,” but this did not seem a virtue to later generations—not, at least, one that outweighed Reni’s manifest vices, the saccharine of his expressions, the self-repetition, the overproduction.
Moreover, his personal life was disastrous, a swamp of neuroses. Reni had the misfortune to be a gambling addict, always badly in debt, and turning out masses of hackwork to stay afloat. It has been surmised, no doubt rightly, that his gambling was inspired by masochism—losing was a form of self-flagellation for the sin of being alive. Since debts had to be paid, he kept an enormous studio—at one point, his biographer Malvasia noted with some amazement, Reni employed some two hundred assistants. At the same time, he was socially inept, agonizingly aware of his poor education (which hampered him as a history painter and made him hopelessly awkward with sophisticates and scholars), and an extreme closet-case. It was commonly assumed that he lived and died a virgin. He was not only a daily churchgoer but morbidly superstitious. Women terrified him—he suspected them all of being witches, a suspicion they could only allay if they showed themselves to be the Virgin Mary, a hard thing to prove—and he could not bear it if anyone except his own mother touched his laundry.
Yet, for all that, he was capable of extraordinary things. Perhaps his greatest painting was done in 1618–19, not long after leaving Rome for his native Bologna, and now in the Prado. This is Atalanta and Hippomenes. In the myth, Atalanta was a swift-running huntress who was determined to keep her virginity and refused to mate with any man who could not outrun her in a footrace. Nobody could, until she was challenged by Hippomenes, who had been provided with three golden apples by the interfering goddess Aphrodite. At intervals in their race, Hippomenes would drop an apple, which Atalanta could not resist; picking them up delayed her so much that she lost both the race and her virginity. Reni’s vision is of two superb nudes that fill the picture space to the exclusion of everything except empty earth, bare sky, and a plain horizon line. But there is little doubt about its subliminal meaning. Hippomenes is well ahead of Atalanta, who is greedily stooping for her second apple. His gesture toward her, however, is one of repulsion and banishment; he is fending off all possibility of contact with her, even though his victory in the race will, according to the myth, entitle him to claim her. He is racing for a prize that he does not desire. It would be hard to think of a more direct statement of homosexual repulsion (within the bounds of decorum) than this.
The word “radical” became so comically overused in the late twentieth century that it has been worn to near-complete vacuity. But there were times (now long gone) when it could (with due caution) be applied to things that happened in the arts. One such time was the early seventeenth century in Rome, and such an event was the appearance in Rome of a young painter named Michelangelo Merisi, known by the name of his birthplace, the northern Italian town of Caravaggio, where he had been born in 1571. There was no reason to suppose that anything of promise, let alone of transforming importance, would come out of a backwater like Caravaggio. It had produced no artists, had no intellectual life, and could boast no aristocratic collections for a young painter to admire or copy. Yet Michelangelo Merisi was a genius, and he possessed what all who knew him agreed was uno cervello stravagantissimo, a really weird turn of mind. What form did the weirdness take? In a word, realism. Caravaggio was not even faintly interested in the tricks and tropes of Mannerist painting—the elongated bodies, the balletic twisting and posturing, the arty metaphors and elaborate concetti. Roman painting in 1592, the year Caravaggio got there, had a great past but a mincing present. Much of it was as fatuous as the stuff that would come to be praised as “postmodernism” there (and in New York) four centuries later: pedantic, clever-clever, garrulous, and full of weightless quotation. He wanted to see reality head-on, and paint it that way, direct from life, with the maximum impact and sincerity, down to the last callused foot and dirty fingernail.