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The martyr who lost his beard
Nicholas Cranfield on a rare chance to study Guido Reni’s Sebastians
 Two out of seven: above: the Saint Sebastian by Guido Reni in the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s collection BY PERMISSION OF THE TRUSTEES OF THE DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY |
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I FIRST started visiting the Dulwich Picture Gallery, one of London’s most hidden gems, 30 years ago and some. I eagerly bought Peter Murray’s handlist of the collection when it appeared in 1980, but there is no mention in it of the startling painting of St Sebastian that forms the centrepiece of the current show. It was in a storeroom. That was surprising, since the former collection of Noel Desenfans, which passed to Sir Francis Bourgeois at his death in 1807 and later formed the core of the Dulwich Picture Gallery (1811), contained two celebrated paintings said to be by “The Divine Guido”, a St John the Baptist in the Wilderness and the St Sebastian. In the first gallery hang, the Roman martyr had been given pride of place at the end of the enfilade, hanging between the St John the Baptist and Veronese’s equally theatrical St Jerome. Both Reni canvases had been in Italian collections until they “arrived” in Regency London in the Desenfans collection. The martyred Sebastian was thought to come from the Palazzo Barberini in Rome (although there appears to be no documentary proof of this) and the Forerunner, a couple of years later, in the year of Trafalgar, 1805, from the Genoese Balbi family. By the 1880s, the prevalence of Ruskin’s tastes raised questions about the Sebastian which only recent cleaning has begun to resolve, and it is this painting that is now the centre of an intense and exploratory exhibition, which has been curated in collaboration with the Palazzo Rosso in Genoa, where it first showed this winter. The exhibition brings together six of seven paintings of the subject which have been regarded as autograph at some stage. Other copies are known in private collections attesting to the popularity of the subject. It is an amazing tribute to curatorial co-operation that such hard work has brought together works from as far afield as Auckland (a picture possibly once owned by King George III) and Puerto Rico, as well as from the Prado and the Capitoline Galleries in Rome, in addition to the Palazzo Rosso’s own depiction. Only the Louvre has not been able to lend on this occasion, claiming that its painting is too fragile to travel. Malvasia published his well-known life of the artist, Felsina pittrice, in Bologna in 1678. From it we learn that Guido Reni, who was baptised at Bologna on 7 November 1575, became one of the most successful and vaunted artists of his day. By 1593, after an apprenticeship with Denys Calvert, he was already known, and, like many of his contemporaries, he was attracted to Rome at the time of the Jubilee, working on commissions there and across Italy for the rest of his life until he died, in Bologna, at the age of 66. As he lay dying, prayers were offered across the cities of Italy, and Malvasia tells us that the Host was placed on exposition in many city churches in Bologna, and that priests as well as members of religious orders offered intercessions for him. For an inveterate gambler, Reni seems to have done as well in death as his paintings fared in his lifetime. Given what we know of Reni’s life (for instance, he had a prestigious school of pupils, numbering more than 200 in his long life, and including Lanfranco, Albani, and Domenichino) and his working practice of “retouching” paintings sometimes begun by others, there have often been disputes about the status of much of his oeuvre.The exhibition sets out to establish the provenance and autograph status of the works, dispelling myths about “copies”, and publishing significant advances in what we know of early-17th-century Italian patronage, painting, and cultural reputations. |
 The Saint Sebastian by Guido Reni on loan from Genoa MUSEI DI STRADA NUOVA, PALAZZO ROSSO, GENOA |
| The variable condition of the works assembled here in one room, where one’s immediate impression is that it has all been done by mirrors, so similar appear the two poses, becomes apparent only on closer examination, as do the divergences of the landscape and seascape backgrounds in each. Of the two paintings that portray a young stripling tied to a tree trunk, that from Genoa (the other is the one in Rome) is perhaps the most celebrated of Reni’s works. It has several pentimenti that could suggest the artist’s own involvement as he changed his mind, but the Roman picture has a more authoritative provenance: it was recorded in the inventory of Caravaggio’s Roman patron, Cardinal del Monte, as early as 1626. Which is the original? Are both copies? Of the other four remaining, the Auckland version is much looser, more impressionistic, and almost heady, and yet the dimensions of the torso and its pose are identical to the other three. It is only an optical illusion, brought about by heightened shadows, which makes his left hand seem so much larger and his chest broader. In two, traces of a halo survive; in that from the Prado, the dignity of the Spanish Court Chapel in the 1740s may have ensured it was painted in, much as it also provided for a fuller loin-cloth. What is to be saluted is that the authors of the catalogue and the curators are not of a mind: their diverse conclusions make further study a real responsibility. This, in part, reflects Malvasia’s own account, since, in all his writing about clients and the works by which Reni was known, he never mentions any commission for a St Sebastian, an observation not made by any of the excellent catalogue entries. An argument from silence of itself cannot secure attributions or degrade them. It is, however, only in the gazette that Malvasia appended to the biography — in which he lists the works that he knew were in the Italy of his day — that he mentioned a picture that may possibly be the Puerto Rico version, as that was said to come from the city of Reni’s birth: “in the sacristy of the Reverend Canons of St Salvatore, the precisely drawn and delicately painted torso of a beautiful St Sebastian”. Questions there may be about Guido Reni’s working methods, but, even in respect of works “in the style of”, the sheer beauty of his images that commanded ardent responses from both men and women has never been at issue. Lavish, sultry, and tender by turn, his painterly style, whether in depicting classical scenes such as his Nessus and Dejanira (Paris) or Atalanta and Hippomenes (Madrid) or biblical scenes (one thinks of his Samson and the Philistines and repeated Crucifixions), make it impossible to remain unpersuaded. It therefore comes as something of a shock to find that this is the first exhibition ever dedicated to Reni in Britain. Images of naked men, often showing grotesque vulnerability in sublimated death throes, have long worried the Church and excited the beholder in equal measure. Writing in the 1560s, Vasari had recounted how Fra Bartolommeo di San Marco (died 1517) had been teased when he came back to Florence for his inability to paint a nude. This led him to paint a picture of Sebastian so “lifelike in the colouring of the flesh, sweet in countenance, and likewise executed with corresponding beauty of person” that the friars learned (through the confessional) that women sinned at the sight of it on the altar. It was hurriedly removed and placed in the Chapter House, later being sold to the king of France. Stendhal, who knew his Vasari, unashamedly sauced up the story; in Mémoirs d’un Touriste he averred that women fainted in front of the altarpieces in Rome which depicted the saint. His prejudices are clear, as there were none on Roman altars. The earliest depictions of Sebastian, however, invariably show him bearded, much like St Peter, with whom he early shared patronage of the city of Rome, alongside St Paul. Sebastian was an army commander whose example encouraged many others to take up Christianity and to pay the cost of it in the notorious persecutions of Diocletian that began in AD 296. He therefore was first portrayed as an elder-figure, venerable as well as saintly. By the 14th century, the toga had been discarded, and a more generic martyr type appeared: youthful, unafraid, and unabashed, a man’s man who was able to withstand the slings and arrows of more than outrageous fortune. Sebastian became one of the great saints appealed to by those facing the onset of plague, its effects almost as immediate as the sudden onslaught of a quiverful of arrows. Because Sebastian did not die from being shot, nor indeed of fright, pace Tom Stoppard’s clever reading of Zeno’s paradoxes in Jumpers, he could be portrayed as a virile youth. Artist after artist wanted to show Man made in God’s image. And who better to do that full justice than the artist nicknamed “Divine”? “The Agony and The Ecstasy: Guido Reni’s Saint Sebastians” is at Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Road, London SE21, until 11 May. Phone 020 8693 5254. www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk |
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