Art: The Partial Comeback of A Fallen Angel

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.