In the fluctuating critical fortunes of the art of Guido Reni, admired by his contemporaries and enthusiastically appreciated by the purchasers of the Grand Tour but later afflicted by devaluation and neglect, this exhibition organised in the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Uffizi offers an opportunity to reconsider the work of an artist of a sublime touch, one of the most prolific draughtsmen of the seventeenth century. The exhibition, curated by Babette Bohn, casts light on the artistic evolution and different functions of Guido’s intense activity as a draughtsman, by exploring the graphic collection of the Uffizi and the drawings that have of old been ascribed to Reni and his most trusted pupils, and to the many others that thronged the “halls” of the master.
The most famous drawings by the Bolognese artist, of which the Uffizi conserves a conspicuous nucleus, frequently referred to in the bibliography although not yet subjected to a global analysis, are displayed alongside those of other artists. Some of these are equally famous (for example, Simone Cantarini) or in any case important (such as Giovanni Lanfranco, Guido Cagnacci, Domenico Maria Canuti), while others are more closely bound to the language of the master (including Giovan Francesco Gessi and Giovanni Andrea Sirani), and finally, in some cases even rare works significantly recorded from antiquity in the graphic collections of the Medici themselves.
The itinerary of the exhibition, displaying 112 works comprising a targeted selection of graphic works from other Italian collections, opens by addressing the masters and artists who influenced Guido Reni, such as Denys Calvaert and the Carracci. This is followed by a group of 53 autograph drawings by Reni, which on the one hand allows us to discern the artist’s debt to his predecessors, and on the other to appreciate how he successfully evolved a style that was entirely his own. Finally, the observation of his artistic legacy to his contemporaries and his successors, rendered possible thanks to the presence of a prolific workshop, rounds off an accomplished formal and historical analysis founded on the vast experience of the curator in the sphere of sixteenth and seventeenth century Bolognese art.
The intention of the exhibition is to combine the systematic and philological recognition of the works by Reni in the vast fond of the Prints and Drawings Department of the Uffizi, with a historic perspective aimed at underscoring the validity, limitations and characteristics of Malvasia’s historical-critical contribution in the light of current critical knowledge.