17 Reni Massacre of the Innocents
1611
Oil on canvas, 268 x 170 cm
Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna
Though the historical significance of Caravaggio and his enormous influence on Baroque painting cannot be overlooked, we should not ignore the fact that there was considerable resistance against the more extreme tendencies in his art, such as the loss of the heroic sphere, or the presentation of the everyday and the ordinary. His greatest rival, whose influence was to extend far beyond that of Caravaggio well into the 18th and 19th centuries, was undoubtedly the Bolognese artist Guido Reni. An early work such as The Massacre of the Innocents bears clear traces of his initial links with Caravaggio and, at the same time, already reveals the most important arguments against him.
Before a landscape bathed in light, but set with dark and heavy architecture, a group of eight adults and eight children (including the putti distributing the palm fronds of victory) has been skilfully arranged. The unusual vertical format, rarely used for this theme, and above all the symmetrical structure of figural counterparts indicate that Reni was particularly interested in a specific problem of composition: that of achieving a balance between centripetal and centrifugal movement while combining them in a static pictorial structure. Reni also seeks to achieve this equilibrium in his expression of effects and in the distribution of colour accents.
….Web Gallery Of Art
