"Baroque Painting in Bologna' at the Getty

The Italian Renaissance calls to mind the great centers of art and patronage: Florence, Venice, and Rome. But many smaller cities had significant traditions; and none, in the late days of the period, was more important than Bologna.

This prominence was principally (although not solely) due to a single remarkable family of talents, the Carracci. Three of its members— Lodovico, the eldest and longest lived (1555-1619), and his cousins, Agostino (1557-1602) and Annibale (1560-1609)— emerged as a kind of joint-stock company, collaborating on projects and in 1582 founding, under Lodovico's leadership, what was to prove the largest "academy" or studio since Raphael's.

The Carracci emerged at a moment when the Renaissance appeared to have spent its best energies. Its last significant movement, the quasi-expressionist style of Mannerism, had faded. The Italian peninsula itself, ravaged by decades of fighting between France and Spain, had entered a period of economic decline that, rather mournfully recorded by the Venetian painters of the 18th Century, was not to be reversed until the 20th.

The only new source of intellectual vigor was the Counter-Reformation, Catholicism's belated response to the challenge posed by Luther and Calvin. This impulse was felt most strongly and immediately in the region directly ruled by the papacy: the belt of territories stretching from Rome to the Adriatic, whose northern anchor was Bologna. From an artistic point of view, the Counter-Reformation expressed itself in a new, more emotionally colored piety, albeit one still mixed with the representations of pagan mythology that remained a staple of the Renaissance.

When Christians and pagans coexisted

The contest between Christian and pagan iconography in Renaissance art that, on a deeper level, represented the surfacing of subterranean currents that had always bound Western cultural and religious practice, was finally won by secularism. The Counter-Reformation and its distinctive artistic style, the Baroque, was the last great upsurge of Christian piety in art, and, where it was victorious, pagan imagery was largely banished, at least until the classical revival of the 18th Century. But in northern Italy, the Renaissance enjoyed a long autumn, its themes refreshed, and the long duel between its Christian and pagan elements suspended in a kind of peaceful coexistence. If this art may technically be regarded as decadent, it exhibited a surprising lightness and youthfulness.

This was particularly the case in Bologna, and it owed a lot to the Carracci themselves. They were not a prominent family; Lodovico, a butcher's son, was nicknamed "the Ox," and Agostino had originally been apprenticed as a tailor. This lack of sophistication served them well, for they took over an established style with skill and élan but without penetrating very deeply below its surfaces.

Similarly, Bologna's relative provincialism, and its distance from Rome itself, meant that older styles— particularly those of neighboring Venice— would have a fair field.

A large alumni network

Art was still big business in late-16th-Century Italy, and wealthy patrons from Rome (particularly the Farnese) took the Carracci up. They soon relocated there, although maintaining their Bolognese roots as well as their academy. Paul Johnson has estimated that more than half the successful Italian artists of the 17th Century hailed from Bologna, and the Carracci and their successors trained most of them. Most prominent among them were Guido Reni (1575-1642) and Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666), known as Il Guercino (the Squinter).

The Bolognese school kept going through the first quarter of the 18th Century, although with diminishing returns; its heyday was finished with the passing of Guercino, a marvelous draughtsman and the pupil of Lodovico himself. Johnson notes that "there is no such thing as a dull Guercino drawing," and although I haven't seen as many of them as Johnson himself, I can heartily second his observation as far as my experience extends.

With a little help from the Germans

A good show of the Bolognese school is long overdue in the U.S., and the Getty Museum has remedied this in a small but choice exhibit of 27 paintings lent by the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen of Dresden, whose founder, the 18th-Century Saxon Elector Augustus III, collected hundreds of works by Bolognese masters.

These include of course the Carracci, whose most talented member, Annibale, is represented by a striking portrait of a lute player, whose cold gaze invites no penetration by the viewer. Guercino, though, has pride of place, beginning with the portrait of Pope Gregory XV that introduces the show, and three of whose mature paintings serve as its climax.

Gregory was pontiff for only two years, and in Guercino's portrait he has the look of a man soon to meet his maker. Seated on his throne, he projects a powerful will and intelligence, but the aura of death is upon him. Guercino spares neither his subject nor the viewer, yet there is as much compassion as the truth of the moment allows. The later trilogy— a Disegno et Colore from about 1640, representing by allegorical figures the principles of line and color that reflected the Neoplatonic studium of the Carracci Academy; a Lot and His Daughters, from about the same time; and a Return of the Prodigal Son (c. 1654-55)— have a Baroque tonality within what is still a fundamentally Renaissance conception.

Evangelists, portrayed as philosophers

Midway in the show is a wall of the four evangelists (c. 1615), also by Guercino and each with his own distinctive representation. This is a highly traditional theme, but the portraits resemble nothing so much as the series of Greek philosophers painted a little later by Guercino's exact contemporary Ribera; once again, the almost interchangeable nature of Christian and pagan representation— or, rather, the convergence of the two under the sign of antiquity--is strikingly apparent.

If Guercino is the star of the show, he has good company. In addition to the Carracci, Reni's limpid Bacchus and Ariadne and Francesco Albani's beautifully composed Galatea in Her Shell Wagon display the lingering classicism of the Bolognese style, while Reni's two depictions of Christ with a crown of thorns, one agonized and one serene, cast a cool look at the central motif of Christian iconography.

Only in two large biblical scenes by Giovanni Lanfranco (1582-1647) does one see the distinctive stamp of the high Baroque, with its heightened gesturalism and expressiveness. Bologna remained in some sense a backwater even when it was a vital center of Italian art; but to that very fact we owe some of the last masterpieces of Renaissance art, art that could perhaps have been produced nowhere else.