The Partial Comeback of A Fallen Angel

By ROBERT HUGHES

Anyone who thinks art reputations, once made, are imperishable, should think again -- about Guido Reni (1575-1642). The retrospective show of 51 of his paintings is on view through May 14 at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, having been seen in Bologna (in a larger form) and Los Angeles. Reni was the leading Bolognese artist of the 17th century. For nearly 200 years after his death, he was adored by a long line of connoisseurs and tourists who held him to have been angelically inspired, the greatest painter of his age: as famous in his own way as Michelangelo, Leonardo, Van Gogh or Picasso. Percy Bysshe Shelley thought that if some cataclysm destroyed Rome, the loss of Raphael and Guido Reni would "be alone regretted."

But the scaly truth is that taste changes; and an anthology of writings on Reni at the end of the catalog charts his fall. You see the first puff of feathers detach itself from the wing of the Angelic Limner in 1846, when John Ruskin lets fly in Modern Painters: "A taint and stain, and jarring discord . . . marked sensuality and impurity." In 1895 Romain Rolland downed him: "He was able to deceive two entire centuries . . . Guido's laborious conscientiousness is void of thought and true feeling." Two years later, Bernard Berenson wrung his neck: "We turn away from Guido Reni with disgust unspeakable." And it was downhill from there; in 1910 one of his versions of Bacchus and Ariadne sold at Christie's for just under (pounds)10, a fraction of its auction price 60 years before. The nadir was in the late '50s, when you could get a 10-ft. Guido Reni (if you wanted it, which few did) for less than $300 at auction. Reni's posthumous career is not one the heroes of the Late Modernist Art Industry can contemplate with equanimity.

What did him in? For the Victorians, the growing belief that his piety was hypocritical. More seriously, Reni's frequent combination of tepid high- mindedness and relentless self-repetition looked insincere to early 20th century eyes. The classicism of his languidly yearning saints, rolling their eyeballs to the light of heaven, seemed trite and formulaic.

Much of it still does. Reni did not make things easy for himself. Apart from being superstitious (he kept seeing a phantom light over his bed) and timid to the point of paranoia (he refused any food sent to him as a gift for fear that it was poisoned), he was a compulsive gambler. It was his only vice. His sex life should certainly have appealed to prudish Ruskin, for it did not exist: he shunned women in the fear that they might be witches. But gambling debts led him to churn out hack paintings, with predictable results for his reputation.

Still, an artist deserves to be judged on his best work, and the idea that Reni was just a painter of saccharine devotional figures does not stand up. He will never get back on the pedestal he occupied in the 17th and 18th centuries, alongside Raphael. But there was a distinct grandeur in Reni, which his sometimes irksome professional smoothness served, and it is still perceptible today.

This show is the first in a generation to restore Reni; the last one, in his native Bologna, was in 1954. To a great extent it succeeds. When the various phases of Reni's work are assembled, he comes across as a far more diverse and interesting painter than one ever expected. His precocity and rate of absorption were equally striking, and they made room for sly humor, as in a pastiche of Caravaggio he did around 1605, when he was barely 30: David with the Head of Goliath, the David sporting a raffishly theatrical feather in his cap as he tilts the severed head like a connoisseur quizzing a sculptor. Some of his key paintings, such as the Prado's extraordinary Atalanta and Hippomenes, in which he achieved a grand synthesis of Caravaggism and classical diction, are missing from Fort Worth. But it is quite clear from a work like Joseph and Potiphar's Wife that Reni could endow human figures with a Caravaggio-like density and passion while pointing the way for a classicism still to come. The figure of Joseph, moving away in its sandals and serene quadrant of ocher cloak, might be striding toward his eventual home in one of Poussin's paintings.

Reni's image of the young Baptist, modeled to the nth degree of sensitivity, warm against the cold blues and dark greens of the framing landscape, seems about to speak; and to look at the landscape background is to realize what English artists a century later, particularly Gainsborough, would gain from Reni. He had an inspired sense of the mechanics of composition, as Nessus and Dejanira proves: an airy ballet on the theme of rape, in which every billow and facet of the drapery seems to operate as form.

Partly because he worked from sketches, engravings or memories of sculpture, Reni's heroic male nudes -- the Samson Victorious, and the various figures of Hercules done for the Gonzaga in Mantua -- have a sculptural intensity that blots out the rest of the painting. Background figures scurry about in deep recession, half transparent, like wraiths out of Tintoretto; the landscape is simplified into broad plains; against this, the single magnified body rises up. One remembers only the imposing structure turning, as it were, before the eye, displaying its stresses and bulges -- straining for embodiment and yet defeating it with its own supercharged mannerism. More than any other artist of his time, Reni adumbrated the abstractness of the neoclassical figure, along with its faint overtones of camp.

That is why, however incongruously, some Renis call to mind "classical" Picasso in the early '20s: both are parodies, Reni's part-subliminal and Picasso's wholly deliberate, of the same antique fantasy of ideal beings on the Mediterranean shore. The point is made by Reni's Bacchus and Ariadne, with its enameled colors, its air of travesty -- one doesn't believe for a second in jilted Ariadne's grief, but one does wonder what her right hand is about to do -- and its iron-butterfly stylishness. This is an idyll that makes no bones about its own artificiality. Brilliance is all, and it is just enough.