The "Divine" Guido: Religion, Sex, Money and Art in the World of Guido Reni. - Review - book review

RICHARD E. SPEAR

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. 430 pp.; 39 color ills., 134 b/w. $65

On the cover of Richard Spear's The "Divine" Guido one sees a virginal Hippomenes shoving Atalanta off the page, over the spine, and onto the back cover. Positioned in between his legs just below his indiscreetly masked genitalia is the title. Before reading The "Divine" Guido I had not given full attention to how the lovely

Atalanta is being cold-shouldered by Hippomenes, taking this merely as an example of Reni's stony ideal of classicism or possibly as an example of his aversion to engage the erotica of Ovid. After reading Spear's delightful book, however, this frigid erotic encounter suddenly becomes more complicated and more vivid, not because Spear takes much time discussing this particular painting (it slips by in three short paragraphs) but because he transformed my perception of Reni and his work in general. Having learned about Reni's fear of physicality--his high level of hygiene, his virginity, his misogyny, and his embarrassment over obscenities and dirty jokes--it is impossible to see Atalanta and Hippomenes in the same way. Suddenly Reni starts popping up everywhere in his work in unexpected guises--here as Hippomenes, there as the unseen viewer of suicidal Cleopatras--never as a psychological automaton but instead as an elusive presence speaking within the conventions of Baroque culture.

The "Divine" Guido is an unconventional and completely refreshing biography that unravels the knotty thickets of Guido Reni's sexual, artistic, and religious lives. Almost all other monographs on Italian Baroque artists, including Spear's own landmark Domenichino, take as their epistemological goal the explanation of individual paintings, their dating and attribution, their iconography, their patrons, and their sitings. With The "Divine" Guido, Spear gives us instead a more open history of the social, intellectual, and psychological conditions of making and viewing paintings. In a series of evocatively intersecting studies that range from gambling to marketing to sex, he reveals the subtle contingencies of life and art, character and creativity. Having written the definitive monograph on the deliberative and principled Domenichino, Spear now takes on a deeply intuitive artist who was uncomfortable with theory and driven by psychological tensions. Spear adapts his approach and topics accordingly by revealing the mutual dependencies of art and psyche without, however, reducing Reni's art to simple causations or simplifying the mysteries and contradictions of human character. Because art is as complex as people, the standard questions of intentionality that bedevil so many other monographs on artists are recast as multivalent readings contingent on the gender, personality, education, birthplace, religion, and so on, of the reader/viewer. Reception theory has borne profitable fruit here. Spear invites diverse responses by including many voices, not just those that you would expect (Reni's contemporaries and art historians), but also a fascinating array of others (the marquis de Sade, Rembrandt Peale, Oscar Wilde, Yukio Mishima). He disavows "an intentionalist's hope to pin down Reni's 'real motives,'" and in so doing grants him the complexity of humanity and, similarly, confers on the viewer a comparable latitude.

The cloying "Divine" of this book's title conjures up the kind of gushy and trite response-"My dear, he is simply divine"--that plagued Reni's reputation as a serious artist for so many modern viewers. It is an intentionally annoying title designed to provoke memories of Reni's saccharine Madonnas and anodyne saints, all prolifically procreated. The distancing quotation marks around "divine," however, signal another, more historicized reading: they inform us of Reni's exalted status in the 17th century; they evoke the conceit of the artist as divine creator; they confirm a neutered sex life; they promise (and deliver) a first-name familiarity with the artist. The portrait Spear paints of the "divine" Guido is vivid and compelling. Vain, suspicious, insecure, misogynist, obsessive, and phobic, Reni can be as unendearing for us as he must have been for his vexed studio assistants and collaborators. Remarkably, Spear captures the interconnected flux of these characteristics, renders his subject sympathetic and believable, and allows his readers to envision their own Reni. With The "Divine" Guido we are introduced to a real and very complex person whose activities as lover (or abstainer), as art marketeer, as thinker, as believer, and as studio pest affected his activity as an artist.

Many art historians prefer to cordon off the different domains of sex, religion, and money; Spear asks how they cross-pollinated. Impressive results have been attained by many scholars who thematized sex, religion, and money as, for example, the fetishized gaze, the ecstatic vision, or art as commodity, but the results have also been sometimes one-dimensional and self-reflective. We might well attend to the Renaissance proverb "every painter paints himself" as we recreate artists in our own self-images. Titian, in Erwin Panofsky's mind, became a learned iconographer even though he needed regular epistolary help; and Caravaggio, the self-fashioned iconoclast, is transformed into a diligent student of ancient and Renaissance art. Spear averts this danger first by disclosing his own personal interests and then by trying to meet Reni on his own terms. The "Divine" Guido is premised on the belief, entirely convincing to me, that Reni had a complex array of psychological needs and behavioral solutions for dealing with his world, and that his art was at once a product of those needs and solutions as well as an essential component that shaped them. We have here a historically grounded study that helps to erase historical distance for the reader, a living Guido that is not dehistoricized for the sake of accessibility but instead is subtly contextualized in his time.

Spear sees Reni not as a tidy cipher--the melancholic loner, the courtly manipulator, the temperamental creator--but as a jagged, conflicted character who can be all of these things at once. Troubled by an irreconcilable mismatch of outer and inner realities, Reni was deeply riven by opposing needs, at once shy and boastful, craving adulation yet adverse to hearing it. Professional success did not diminish his inferiority complex. Anthologies of praise published during the 1630s and a box full of letters from an admiring nobility did not moderate his belief that he held no rightful place within a literate society. Ashamed of his shallow learning, he adopted various stratagems to disguise what he took to he a defect: "When he was drawn into conversation, he manipulated matters so that discussion focused on subjects that were easy and familiar to him. Through his witticisms, he managed to promote the appearance of greater depth of learning than he possessed. His friendships with poets notwithstanding, he prefe rred as companions the illiterate and gamblers. To judge from these various reports, Reni was quite self-conscious of his inadequacies and, with a feeling of shame, sought to cover them up.... He was anxiety-prone, mistrustful, and even paranoid, as so many episodes confirm, from his great fear of traveling, which made him feel unsafe, to how he managed interpersonal relations" (p. 20).

In order to arrive at this diagnosis, Spear had to separate reality from literary topos and incidental from essential detail, and then find patterns of behavior that at once cohere and contradict. He does not intend to denigrate or delimit Reni but, quite the reverse, to open our eyes to the puzzling ineffability of human behavior. Spear enabled me to feel sympathy toward a man who could easily be seen as repellent. I was constantly impressed by how nonjudgmental Spear could be with someone so different from himself, how sensitively caring he is for Reni's human limitations while describing them so clinically. Indeed, by using "limitations," I have approached an area of normative judgment that Spear carefully avoids. He does not take a moral or psychological position of rectitude but tries to evaluate Reni on his own terms and within the cultural context of his time.

Sex is the playground of psychohistory and deservedly so. Spear fully utilizes recent studies on sexuality (Foucault, Laqueur, among others), Lacanian psychoanalysis, and feminism without, however, letting his work be driven by any particular approach. Compared with some too determined, dehistoricized readings of artists' psychosexuality--Robert Liebert's Michelangelo and Howard Hibbard's Caravaggio pop to mind--Spear's is psychologically sophisticated and nuanced. Gender identity was a prime determinant in forming one's identity in 17th-century Italy, as it is now, and it is in this area that Spear makes some of his most important contributions. Misogynist views of female sexuality and their enactments in theology (Mariology, for example) and in society (witch-hunts, for example) provide a continuing framework for interpreting Reni's paintings. By framing questions around the various constructs of woman's identity, Spear finds underlying continuities and iconographic fluidities that unite Reni's Lucretias, Cleopatras, and Magdalens, subjects that are usually discussed separately as the sacred or profane but are here brought together in a particularly convincing fashion. Spear delves into the psychological and belief systems where such sublimated oppositions as the Virgin Mary and witches converge.

The chapter on sex is framed by ones on witches and martyrs. Reni lived with his mother until she died, when he was fifty-five, and thereafter he refused to have any woman live in his house or have women's laundry touch his own. According to his principal biographer and acquaintance, Carlo Cesare Malvasia, he became "like marble" in the presence of a female model. Reni probably explained this to himself more in terms of witchcraft than sex, but as Spear shows, the two are intimately entwined. Witches manifested for Reni (and he was not alone in his phobia) the carnal power of female sexuality. "Angelic" in appearance according to contemporaries, he was used by Ludovico Carracci to depict an angel and chose to portray himself as "La Turbantina." He blushed easily and exhibited a delicate sensibility that fits readily within preconceptions of the feminized gay male. Spear is uneasy with this stereotype and questions the misogyny behind male "effeminacy" but concedes that by seicento coding Reni was probably cr oss-gendered: "On the basis of everything reported about his behavior, my guess is that Reni feared touching anyone's body, whether man's or woman's, that his psycho-sexual makeup was passive and 'angelic,' and that he just did not fit neatly society's expectations of male behavior--what today would be designated 'cross-gendered' by revisionist critics of gender categories" (p. 58). Of the fascinating evidence adduced, none is more provocative and ambiguous than Reni's decision to depict himself in the famous S. Michele in Bosco fresco cycle as cross-dressed, an egg-bearing woman bringing her gifts to Saint Benedict. Given the negative associations, even illegalities of sodomy, and given Reni's shame associated with these tendencies, his adoption of this role defies easy explanation: "I cannot know if Reni's decision to portray himself dressed as a woman may have derived from a transvestite or transsexual urge, any more than I can gauge the 'femininity' within him or decide if he really abstained from all sex ual activity. What is evident, however, is that he was mindful of visual codes of dress (fashioning his self-image in summer in silk, in winter in velvet) and that cross-dressing then, as now, could unsettle social signs of sex and status" (p.56).

The chapter on the secular martyrs of Cleopatra and Lucretia is a tour de force. Uncomfortable in the presence of women, especially when they were modeling nude, Reni faltered in painting them, perhaps even making them look the way he felt, "like marble," as Malvasia put it. Men, by contrast, are given greater anatomical precision and emotive range, more as "tactile, empowered presences" than as "impotent abstractions." Women are portrayed as desexualized personae and seen through a sadomasochistic veil. Reni's fascination with suicidal Cleopatras and Lucretias wielding phallic snakes and daggers is presented in terms of post-Lacanian oppositions of "voyeurism and exhibitionism, and sadism and masochism." Before reading The "Divine" Guido I usually dismissed these paintings as banal and simplistic, numbingly repetitive in their similarity, trite in the expression of averted gazes, but after finishing the chapter on suicide "Martyrs," I saw instead an unsettling liminality where our imagination is encouraged to mingle with the artist's fantasies, at once probing and recoiling from the physical and psychological act of suicide. The viewer becomes complicit with the artist.

Gambling, witches, sex, and martyrs are more than convenient categories borrowed from Reni's biographies; they are brought together intentionally: "It is plausible to me that, within the socio-cultural context of seventeenth-century Bologna, deep religiosity, visionary experiences, obsessive gambling, belief in witches and fear of women can be framed together in a meaningful fashion. I surmise that religion and gambling, through their distinctive means, served Reni as related practices with a common end, in that each tested where the player stood in relation to the will of others, whether God or chance, and that each provided the artist with immediate relief from inner pressures, although in the case of gambling guilt compromised his temporary release" (p. 59). Reni's gambling addiction drove him to act in humiliating ways. Such was his bad luck at the table that in two spectacular nights he lost what Guercino would have earned in ten years. He reduced himself to hack work, painting "rashly, inattentively .. . like a miserable mercenary," as Malvasia put it. This formulation of financial exigency producing hasty painting may well be true, but Spear probes deeper into the literature on gambling and addictive personalities and proposes that Reni's behavior demonstrates a personality disorder arising "from an inability to regulate tension, a difficulty frequently observed in persons, like Reni, with paranoid personalities and problems of self-esteem regulation" (p. 42).

Pt. 2 introduces theology to this fertile mix. "God's Grace" is posed against and colored by "Guido's Grace." Critics invariably turned to grace, either personal or divine, physical or spiritual, to explain Reni and his art. It described many things at once: the angelic expression of his figures, the melting colors, the viewer's swooning response, the artist's spirituality, femininity, and purported virginity, and even his position in history linking him to a distinguished lineage that included Apelles, Raphael, Correggio, and Parmigianino. Reni's grace could signify any of these things in different contexts, but in citing individual usages Spear intends us to hold in mind the ineffable whole collectively, believing that the associative interplay among them is more illuminating than the intentional singularity of any given example. "Grace" also performs an important retrospective function in The "Divine" Guido by justifying suggestions in pt. 1 that Reni's paintings are cognitively and perceptually contingen t. Because grace is a beauty that transcends rules, reason, and other forms of mundane knowledge or analysis, because it partakes more of the infinite than the finite, it helps explain why Reni's work can be seen as a kind of palimpsest whose meaning cannot be fully bolted down with words and logic.

Readers of this review might conclude that The "Divine" Guido is all about sex. It isn't. Spear provides a thorough, revealingly feminist history of the Immaculate Conception along with cogent summaries of other Marian doctrines and imagery. We are given vignettes on gestures of disdain and imploring, and on the sociology of tears and hair. Sex is virtually absent from Pt. 3, where Spear turns to the economics and techniques of art, with the chapters "Marketing," "Studio," "Di Sua Mano" and "Ullima Maniera." His fascinating social and economic history of art helps us answer such questions as: What were the financial constraints to pictorial composition? What were Reni's marketing strategies that helped him create artificial shortages and manipulate a patron's sense of social status in order to increase profits? What were the different pricing policies in Emilia? Does value reside in invention or execution, in the number of figures, or in the patron's status? How is a painting's price affected by its being au tograph or retouched, an original or copy? Spear's discussion of Reni's late (or "last") style is probably the best in a problematic field that includes studies in the late styles of Titian and Michelangelo.

In "Marketing," Spear returns to the theme of financial deprivation, real or imagined, that arose from Reni's gambling addiction: "Reni's well-documented shrewd and defensive behavior when money was involved leads me to grapple with the complicated questions, what, other than gambling, motivated the artist to act the way he did, and did this behavior affect the appearance of his work? Were his professional actions simply as miserly as his private ones, like the way be would survey the goods in the piazza three or four times in order to save a penny? Albani pointedly called him 'smorza sforfaroli,' an idiom that implies someone who is so penny-pinching that he would try to burn matches twice. Or was Reni's behavior basically triggered by a need for self-esteem, which high prices could buoy up?" (p. 210). As a "prickly narcissist" he often felt underpaid, money being one of the most common measures of self-worth then as it is now. When asked who was the better artist, he or Guercino, Reni responded: "I am, Fat hers ... first, because my pictures sell better than his." The behavior pattern emerged early in life (as an apprentice he left Calvaert's studio and shortly afterward broke off with Ludovico Carracci over money matters) and continued unrelentingly through his life. Unlike Guercino, who fixed his prices using a formula (100 ducats for a full-length figure, 50 ducats for half-length, 25 for heads), Reni avoided set prices. Instead, he gambled that his patrons would pay him more than he could reasonably request. Other artists engaged in this marketing strategy, and may also have used ploys such as selling copies or using strategic delays to pry open patrons purses, but Reni used them relentlessly and with greater inner conflict: "While craving profits, he hated to deal with financial matters and denied his pecuniary appetite" (p. 213).

How, then, did all of this affect his art? He maximized profits by painting quickly and often mechanically for low pay ("low" being only a relative measure for this high-priced artist). He regarded his studio more as a business venture than as a place of learning, treating everyone as students instead of as equals, as did the Carracci. It was huge by any measure, with as many as eighty students compared with Domenichino's dozen, and he charged each of them a monthly fee. The scale of production must have been staggering, as now evidenced by the many "Guidos" littering collections everywhere. Quality control and questions of "originality" did not unduly concern him. Spear untangles the web of studio collaboration in a most sophisticated fashion, equaled by only a handful of scholars (Michael Baxandall and Jennifer Montngu come to mind here). Reni provided "certificates" of authenticity, which could mean almost anything: that the painting was a studio work retouched by him, or an autograph copy, or an authorize d copy by a trusted pupil, or even a purely studio production. Because Reni copied himself more often than most artists, problems of attribution plague his oeuvre. Spear does not try to solve these as a connoisseur, even though he is more than qualified to do so, but instead chooses to discuss them in terms of artistic practice and art historical method.

In "Di Sua Mano" Spear gives us a wonderful cultural history of the hand as a means of understanding some thorny questions about originality. The "hand" in literature and legal contracts could mean professional skill, authorial responsibility, artistic inspiration, or an artist's individual style. Spear shows how Reni's "hand" was used to convey the divinity of his creations, suffused with the grace that was uniquely his own. Although Reni considered art to be more perspiration than inspiration, he would probably not have objected to his work being characterized in this way. However, when he came to talk about his "hand," he took an expedient, even self-serving, view that authenticity resided not in "drawing, sketching and background painting," which he willingly assigned to his assistants as things that "are just like a simple contract that, before you place your hand on it and sign it, is worthless." Instead, he invested originality in manual technique and retouchings as much as in conception and inventio n. Unlike Malvasia, who complained that copies retouched by Reni "were many times palmed off as originals," the artist took a more liberal view that if his talented brush had touched the painting's surface, it was an original. By valorizing the surface Reni not only justified his studio's mass production that fed his gambling habit but he also directs our attention to brushwork, color harmonies, caressed surfaces, and expressive nuances of tears or quivering lips.

In conclusion I would like to emphasize how much The "Divine" Guido is a masterpiece of evocation and equivocation, presenting complex, contradictory, multilayered evidence without extracting from it a conclusive resolution or reducing it to tidy solutions. I mean "equivocation" in the very best sense, too rare in clever art histories, one that conjures up the elusive qualities of life itself. Instead of imposing a closed, "correct" interpretation that solves contrived problems, Spear allows his readers an interpretative space to compose their own. By eschewing jargon and self-cloaking hermeneutics, Spear presents complex ideas with subtlety and clarity that will certainly appeal to the educated public, professional humanists, and art history students and scholars alike. He has an uncanny ability to enliven seicento culture with contemporary parallels: Kellogg's cereals as "dietary prophylactics," Pat Robertson on feminism as witchcraft, a crying mail-order Madonna from Pennsylvania, and the "Inspira-Clock" and other "1950s Jesus-junk." He does this without yielding to ahistoric judgments or intending to merely entertain. His book is, however, fun to read, full of illuminating examples and glorious color illustrations; it is lavishly documented and delightfully free of portentous theorizing.

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