Guido Reni and the Poets. Painting through a Different Lens

An unprecedented number of poems were written in praise of Guido Reni’s paintings during his lifetime. This paper explores the ways in which the engagement of the beholder with the artwork is thematized in these texts, and how they may relate to the paintings in question. Particular attention will be paid to the way the beholder deals with a tension that is evident in many of the poems on Reni’s paintings, namely that between the illusionism and liveliness of the painted scene and figures on the one hand, and the apparent material qualities of the paintings on the other. Through these texts, it will be argued, we get a sense of how the informed beholder may have looked at Reni’s paintings, or, in other words, what Reni’s paintings looked like through the poet’s lens.