Guido Reni’s Crucifixion of St. Peter: Style, Iconography and Fortune

Abstract

The Crucifixion of St. Peter, commissioned by Pietro Aldobrandini for the church dedicated to St. Paul in the Tre Fontaneabbey(and today in the Vatican Pinacoteca),was the work with which Guido Reni established himself in Rome. The comparison with Caravaggio was immediately evident to the Roman public, that is to a wider circle than that of just the intendenti, not only for the unequivocal stylistic turn of Guido, but also and above all because the subject was the same as the Crucifixion of St. Peter of Santa Maria del Popolo, one of the more recent and more problematic paintings by Caravaggio; moreover, it was a subject that had been discussed for some time, and would always remain so, from an iconographic point of view. Guido found himself faced with a very stimulating task, and the response of his contemporaries, from Ribera to Guercino, up to Mattia Preti, shows how the painting was immediately judged a capital work, the manifesto of an art that attempted to reconcile naturalism with completely different instances, also recovering solutions from the painting of late Roman Mannerism.