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This show is the first in a generation to restore Reni; the last one, in his native Bologna, was in 1954. To a great extent it succeeds. When the various phases of Reni's work are assembled, he comes across as a far more diverse and interesting painter than one ever expected. His precocity and rate of absorption were equally striking, and they made room for sly humor, as in a pastiche of Caravaggio he did around 1605, when he was barely 30: David with the Head of Goliath, the David sporting a raffishly theatrical feather in his cap as he tilts the severed head like a connoisseur quizzing a sculptor. Some of his key paintings, such as the Prado's extraordinary Atalanta and Hippomenes, in which he achieved a grand synthesis of Caravaggism and classical diction, are missing from Fort Worth. But it is quite clear from a work like Joseph and Potiphar's Wife that Reni could endow human figures with a Caravaggio-like density and passion while pointing the way for a classicism still to come. The figure of Joseph, moving away in its sandals and serene quadrant of ocher cloak, might be striding toward his eventual home in one of Poussin's paintings.
Reni's image of the young Baptist, modeled to the nth degree of sensitivity, warm against the cold blues and dark greens of the framing landscape, seems about to speak; and to look at the landscape background is to realize what English artists a century later, particularly Gainsborough, would gain from Reni. He had an inspired sense of the mechanics of composition, as Nessus and Dejanira proves: an airy ballet on the theme of rape, in which every billow and facet of the drapery seems to operate as form.
Partly because he worked from sketches, engravings or memories of sculpture, Reni's heroic male nudes -- the Samson Victorious, and the various figures of Hercules done for the Gonzaga in Mantua -- have a sculptural intensity that blots out the rest of the painting. Background figures scurry about in deep recession, half transparent, like wraiths out of Tintoretto; the landscape is simplified into broad plains; against this, the single magnified body rises up. One remembers only the imposing structure turning, as it were, before the eye, displaying its stresses and bulges -- straining for embodiment and yet defeating it with its own supercharged mannerism. More than any other artist of his time, Reni adumbrated the abstractness of the neoclassical figure, along with its faint overtones of camp.
That is why, however incongruously, some Renis call to mind "classical" Picasso in the early '20s: both are parodies, Reni's part-subliminal and Picasso's wholly deliberate, of the same antique fantasy of ideal beings on the Mediterranean shore. The point is made by Reni's Bacchus and Ariadne, with its enameled colors, its air of travesty -- one doesn't believe for a second in jilted Ariadne's grief, but one does wonder what her right hand is about to do -- and its iron-butterfly stylishness. This is an idyll that makes no bones about its own artificiality. Brilliance is all, and it is just enough.