The misogynist who painted Madonnas

Stephen Pepper

THE DIVINE GUIDO: RELIGION, SEX, MONEY AND ART IN THE WORLD OF GUIDO RENI by Richard E. Spear Yale, £40, pp. 430 It is welcome news that at last Professor Spear's long-promised volume devoted to the personality and art of Guido Reni has appeared. Spear is one of the pillars of American academic art history, occupying a named chair at Oberlin College and hav- ing served as editor of the professional journal, The Art Bulletin. The present volume demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of that environment: it is erudite and well-researched, but, as will be discussed below, uncritically proceeds from certain assumptions regarding art and religion which, in my opinion, effectively exclude an appreciation of Guido Reni's achievement as a great artist.

Spear's book is certainly ambitious:

[My book] is a series of linked studies of Reni's career and the complex interplay between his pictures, personality, and 17th- century society. It is a string of essays about originals and copies, about profit motives and marketing strategies, and about religious imagery, dogma, and audience.

While proposing to cover all these topics, he modestly tells us:

In the context of this study, I cannot give adequate attention to all of the issues that arise from suicidal behaviour or its bibliogra- phy.

Guido Reni (1575-1642), who was born and died in Bologna, is usually considered one of the greatest Italian artists of the 17th century, renowned for his religious imagery. Certainly Spear has a novel approach to his life and work: I propose that Reni's psycho-sexual makeup and personality affected how he pictured and criticised some of his male and female fig- ures, regardless whether more emphasis should be placed on his intense misogyny or his elusive sexual orientation as they bear on his dread of witches and, in turn, 17th- century societal beliefs about women.

The basis for undertaking such an approach, according to the author, is the remarkable life of Reni written by Count Carlo Cesare Malvasia, himself a native of Bologna and a near contemporary of the painter, whose 'rich and reliable source' the author relies on to such an extent that, • . . I trust his account of Reni's life, enough that a strain of my book is our book, two authors in search of a character.' Reni's biography appeared in Malvasia's two volumes of the lives of the Bolognese artists that was published in 1678 called La Felsina pittrice (Felsina is the Etruscan name of Bologna). But Malvasia is not exactly the disinter- ested party that one might conclude from those words. His biography would be char- acterised in modem terms as 'unautho- rised', and in 17th-century terms as oversteppping decorum. It is precisely the unexpurgated portions in which Malvasia reports on Reni's gambling, his disordered life, and, above all, his alleged decline as an artist due to these factors, that Spear refers to when he adds, 'Though Malvasia was not Freud, he did convey exceptionally rich information. '

Malvasia brought two principal concerns to his life of Reni. First, his desire to enhance the reputation of the Bolognese school of art in the eyes of his contempo- raries, especially in those of King Louis XIV of France to whom his book is dedicated. His task was made the more urgent because his contemporary and rival, G. P. Bellori, had shortly before published his collection of artists' lives, championing Rome as the home of art and dedicating his work to Colbert. Thus in one respect Malvasia's Life is an encomium to Reni, Who was considered at the time he wrote to be the greatest painter of Bologna (and Perhaps of Europe), especially in France. Malvasia's second preoccupation is with reputation, particularly the role of the liter- ary man in determining it, for, in addition to his identification as a Bolognese patriot, he strongly identified himself with what the French Academician Marc Fumaroli has called the Republic of Letters. According to Malvasia, Reni spurned the importance of writers, considering his brush to have earned him fame and reputation rather than the hyperbole of authors. This had caused one author, Marchese Virgilio Malvezzi, 'to turn affection for him into hatred and praise into displeasure'. Thus the other side of Malvasia's biography is to reveal the seamy side of Reni's life in order to show that the power of the pen could compete with and even subdue the force of the brush. While this does not mean that Malvasia's account is not factually true, it does mean he cannot be taken at face value. It is anomalous to talk about Malva- sia's 'depth of analysis' as Spear does, or to say that he 'opens up Reni's personality', at least in any modem sense of that phrase. He wished to exalt Reni and simultaneous- ly disparage him, and he adopted the tactic of discrediting his late or 'second' manner as weak because of his gambling and his consequent need for money. Thus Spear is, at the very least, ingenuous, when he writes, 'It hardly seems necessary to say that neither Malvasia nor I cite such infor- mation to discredit the artist.'

Spear resembles Malvasia in that he, too, is interested in reputation and believes in the force of the written word, as if by virtue of the fact that someone at some time wrote something makes it true. He charac- terises Reni at one time or another as a misogynist, a closet homosexual, a gambler and a psychotic, and does it not because Malvasia so characterised him, but on the authority of mainly modem, mainly Ameri- can, social scientists and pyschologists. Thus he can write, 'Magic and religion were compatible systems of belief in the 17th century' and documents this sweeping judgment of an age on merely the authority invested in a footnote.

Spear wishes to establish that Reni was very probably a homosexual and that this controlled his image of St Sebastian, and in addition that his Magdalens and his Virgins were largely determined by his misogyny:

In light of the constructed image of the Mag- dalen as a beautiful, fallen prositute, who regained grace through Christian faith, the elusive question arises, how did a misogynist such as Reni understand her?

The basis for these speculations in part is contemporary psychiatric literature. One could challenge the argument the author presents, and, as at the recent 0. J. Simp- son trial, call to the stand opposing author- ities to dispute the claims. But the substantive point is a different one: one could accept everything the author advances and still not gain one significant insight into Reni's art. That is the principal flaw of the book.

There are in fact two competing and mutually exclusive terms of reference by which Reni's work can be judged. The first is the one adopted by the author:

In saying that Reni's depictions of St Sebas- tian, Lucretia, Cleopatra, and the Mules' appeal to viewers through complexly layered, gendered biases, I mean by way of their inde- terminate messages about male and female behaviour, particularly because no conven- tional androcentricity seems to have deter- mined their looks and actions.

This point of view claims that the universe and many within it are limited to sensuous experience. The author cites Sacher- Masoch in his famous Venus in Furs: 'As you know, I am a supersensualist . . . To endure horrible tortures seemed from then on the highest form of delight', the latter comment a propos the lives of the Chris- tian martyrs. The author shares the view of the fundamental and irreducible role of sensuous experience. For example, in com- menting on the view that Reni was a virgin, he writes, 'or even "sexless" [referring to Reni], if such a condition really is possible in a normal human body'. If the experience of sexuality is a fixed universal of human experience, what then are we to make of the human life of the Buddha, or of Jesus Christ for that matter? Regarding Christ we have Spear's answer:

Jesus Christ, whose human sexual body formed naturally in Mary's womb, but whose divine body was godly and asexual or bisexual in kind.

Spear wishes to make of Christ yet another product of Reni's confused sexual preferences, wherein female features sug- gest the bisexual character of God: 'These psychosexual characteristics are in excep- tional equilibrium and fluidity in Reni's art, allowing multiple cross-gendered readings.' But Christ himself is somewhat confused as to his nature. The ultimate statement of a purely sensuous view of the mystery of Christ is thus expressed as might the most bizarre of all consequences of divine enfleslunent: of the promise of sal- vation by way of Christ's masochistic, even cannibalistic command to eucharistic nour- ishment (Matthew 26:26) 'Take, eat, this is my body.'

The alternative approach is that in which the transcendental dimension of experience is taken into account. Spear claims that his approach and that of Fumaroli, cited above, are compatible, although their emphasis differs. But treating the same material, Fumaroli writes in his recent book, L'Ecole du Silence, that with the art of Guido 'we find ourselves in the center of a universe of Catholic piety as strange to us as that of Bororo [sic] Indians'. Guido's physical beauty, with its feminine sweetness reflects

a mystical gift, actually specifically Catholic, a capacity for direct knowledge and spiritual perception of the divine that . . . is far above the science of the erudite and the spirit of the clever.

For Fumaroli this is a feminine gift, and is reflected in the female aspect of the beauty of his images of Christ. But in no way does this connote an 'engendered' definition, or sexual orientation, of himself or his representations of Christ; rather 'the beau- ty of Guido predestines him to become an "imitator" of Christ', a spiritual calling.

It is difficult to see how only a shift of emphasis distinguishes Fumaroli's interpre- tation of Reni as

of melancholic temperament with a fit of grace that permits him to restore to painting a beauty that reveals to the senses the splen- dour and the sweetnes of the divine,

from Spear's view 'of Reni's representa- tions of martyred men' enticing viewers by 'their erotic projections' of the painter's sexual masochism.

It was Henry Adams, the famous American historian, who posed the central problem with which the modern historian committed to historical truth must struggle in order to interpret the past: how can an age whose centre of cultural gravity is the dynamo understand an age whose centre is the Madonna? The only sensible answer is that the historian must exercise his creative imagination to empathise with the past age to gain a glimpse of it; otherwise he only finds in the past the sources of the St Mary Magdalene, c. 1627 prejudices of the present. Instead, the purpose of this effort is to use this 'glimpse of the past' to reflect back on our own age and thereby gain a degree of detachment. Sir John Elliott did so in his biography of Count-Duke Olivares, and so did Fumaroli in his study of Reni. It is in his failure to exercise such creative empathy that Spear obscures rather than illuminates Reni's situation.

Not only that, but I believe it is possible to understand Reni's faith not only as a his- torical phenomenon but as a spiritual force. This does not mean that one has to be a believing Catholic to interpret Reni, or to ignore his suffering caused by his obvious neuroses. But one cannot explain his art by means of his neuroses. Lawrence Kubic, a famous American psychoanalyst, criticised psychoanalytic theory for defining only the pathologic characteristics of mind, but failing to define the healthy mental outlook, which he identified with the cre- ative process. Reni is a case in point. Because of his strong identity as an artist, for which Malvasia — and Spear — offer much evidence, Reni when painting was able to free himself from the plagues that assailed him and pursue the vision that Fumaroli attributes to him with such clarity that to his contemporaries he seemed divinely inspired: This is a Magdalen in penance caught up in the love of God and longings for heaven — she has an air so beautiful and so noble that it is difficult to carry to a higher degree the expression of the subject she represents, wrote one 17th-century French writer of Reni's famous image of the Repentant Magdalen.

What is the content of this vision? Malvasia in an eloquent passage describes one of Reni's most famous crucifixions, the one painted for the Capuchin church and now in the National Gallery of Bologna: The head of the tormented Redeemer turned upward to heaven seems to breathe those last words which make us understand what in that action divinity become human [or humanised] could be.

Thus Reni moved his audiences by render- ing visible that precise mement when divine and human join and we experience the limit of the latter just before it becomes the former; thereby he takes us beyond our human limit to join us to the divine. Spear, however, translates Divinita umanita' as 'divinity made flesh' and thereby destroys the entire transcendental character of Reni's masterpiece. He does so intentional- ly since he returns incessantly to what he .refers to as 'divine enfleshment'.

It is the poverty of this approach in which the obvious transcendental aspect of Reni's art is ignored and instead his images are submitted to an analysis based on the exigencies of the flesh that denies to Spear's book, despite its impressive erudi- tion, relevance as a means to interpret Reni's art.