Saint Sebastian by Guido Reni, ca. 1619. Recorded on February 5, 2025

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Prado Museum for another of our weekly sessions in English here with the American Friends of the Prado Museum. Today we're going to be talking about this fabulous Italian Baroque painter Guido Reni with his painting of Saint Sebastian. Guido Reni was from Bologna and he lived from 1575 to 1642 and he was called the Divine Guido. He's one of the few artists actually to have this nickname, to be called the Divine. The Divine has been been reserved for very few artists like Apelles from ancient Greece or Raphael from the Renaissance and Guido Reni. So today we're going to see this Saint Sebastian by the Divine Guido Reni. Now Guido was a pupil of the Caraccis in Bologna and from that academy of the Caraccis he learned how to combine the power of pathos with classicism and he admired artists like Raphael, like Correggio and Veronese. In 1601 he moved to Rome and when he was in Rome he was fascinated with the remains of the classical world that he saw there and we can see the influence of some of those remains in this painting because we do have a visual source for this part of the painting here of the head and of the twist of the neck which is inspired by the Dying Alexander. The Dying Alexander is in the Uffici galleries and the identification of that bus, this classical bus with the figure of Alexander the Great is based on a text by Plutarch who recognizes this lion-like hair and his melting upward turned eyes and I think that we can see some of that here although Reni has made the features a little bit softer than Alexander's masculine strong jaw here. And when he was in Rome he was also interested in the work of Caravaggio. He actually had an intense rivalry with Caravaggio and at one point Caravaggio even somewhat accuses him of stealing his style and we can certainly see this influence of chiaroscuro in this painting of Saint Sebastian, this pronounced use of light and dark. And also Guido Reni just like Caravaggio has this tendency to create reduced compositions with just one or just a few figures but while Caravaggio boasted about the ordinariness of his models of painting people that he found on the streets, Reni painted these figures that seem more beautiful than anything that we can find in nature in the real world, like a perfection, an amendment of the natural world. In 1613, 1614 he moved back to Bologna and he had a large workshop with a lot of apprentices, a lot of assistants, and he repeatedly painted these half-body figures of people from the Bible, of figures from mythology and it speaks to their success on the market. He did a few versions of Mary Magdalene, of Cleopatra, and also of Saint Sebastian. This is one of five paintings that Reni made of this subject. So who is Saint Sebastian? Well Sebastian is a saint from the third century and he was a soldier in the Roman army and he was part of the elite guard for the emperor Diocletian and Diocletian was persecuting the Christians. Sebastian was a Christian but he was keeping his beliefs to himself but when Diocletian found out that he had a Christian in his elite guard, he sentenced him to death and so he ordered that he be tied to a tree and shot with arrows. Although Sebastian didn't die because a Christian woman, Irene, came along and she tended to his wounds and Sebastian went back and confronted Diocletian and again sentenced him to be executed and he was clubbed to death. Now his image was popular in medieval times and he was often thought to be a figure that might have some curing powers and healing powers for the Black Plague and when we see images of Saint Sebastian in medieval times we see a figure that's often covered with blood with a lot of arrows and we can see here that that image is a little bit different from what we have in front of us today because in the Renaissance his image changed slightly and we start to see Sebastian as a young man in great physical condition and he's good looking and he was kind of thought of as this sort of a Christian Apollo. Notice that we have just one symbolic arrow that this figure is not covered with arrows anymore. There's no sense of this blood of this violence that we have in the medieval images of Saint Sebastian. Instead we have this graceful, elegant, powerful but restrained expression on his face of pain and suffering but also of desire of this longing for relief of the afterlife and over time he's represented with less and less clothing as well which ends up leaving us with this image of this beautiful man that's also intensely sensual. Sometimes really the subject of Saint Sebastian was somewhat of an excuse to be able to have a beautiful male nude portrait in your collection without really pushing societal norms. The sensuality of this work was already so evident by the 18th century that the Queen of Spain, Elizabeth Farnese, when she had this placed in her oratory at the Palace of Aranjuez, she actually ordered that Sebastian's body be covered up a little bit more. She ordered that this loincloth be extended to cover parts of his body here. Let's see if I can show you a picture of what this looked like until just recently and here we can see just a few years ago for the exhibit of Guido Reni that was held here at the Prado Museum curated by David García Acueto, the restoration team removed the additions of this loincloth so we can see what the original painting looked like. Now Carlos Navarro, the curator of the 19th century collection, a curator of the 19th century collection, here included this painting in another exhibit that was called The Other's Gates, Spaces of Difference. In this exhibit we examined a handful of works in the museum that reflected on the history of the reality of same-sex sentimental relations and the diversity of sexual identities seen here in the Prado's collection because it was in the 19th and the 20th century that another Saint Sebastian by Guido Reni in was cited several times for its intense sensuality and the awakening of desire by writers like Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, or Yuko Amishima. Now maybe surprising to us today is the fact that Guido somewhat fell out of fashion in the 19th century. He had a very successful career and had a wonderful reputation and was popular in the market throughout the 18th century but then with the 19th century he wasn't quite as popular during the time of Romanticism because they found his painting to be too neat and too tidy and maybe a little bit dry, not with this creative punch that the Romantics were looking for. And so the figure of Guido Reni really has been rediscovered, the taste for Guido Reni really has been rekindled in the 20th century starting in the 1930s with writers like Roberto Longhi and then in Spain with Alfonso Pérez Sánchez and then Juan Antonio Gaya Núñez. And his presence in museums everywhere and certainly in the Prado Museum has been increasing and increasing and culminating with this incredibly important and wonderful exhibit of Guido Reni that was held here in 2023 curated so thank you for joining me today to see a little bit more about this Saint Sebastian by Guido Reni and we'll see you again next week.