In the studio of Guido Reni

In the Guido Reni retrospective in Frankfurt, which we were lucky enough to visit and about which we wrote (see article) and produced a video, a painting in the Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans, David Contemplating the Head of Goliath (ill. 1) was presented for the first time in an exhibition as an autograph work by the painter, whereas it had long been considered to be a copy. The restoration it underwent confirmed the curators’ intuitions, and since then this attribution has been validated by specialists in the artist and in Bolognese painting.

This major rediscovery for French museums is now being celebrated in Orléans itself, with a particularly successful exhibition devoted to Guido Reni’s studio, with the painting taking pride of place in the exhibition. It was a remarkable opportunity to compare this picture with the one of the same subject in the Louvre, and very similar in composition, which has always been recognised as an original. One disappointed hope: the David Contemplating the Head of Goliath in the Paris museum (ill. 2) was not loaned because it is now on display at the Louvre-Lens. We don’t know how to describe such a refusal, which only confirms all the fears we had about this flawed project for a branch of the Louvre. Refusing to lend a work for a fully scientific exhibition that advances the history of art in order to hang it in Lens, where it could be interchangeable with any other Bolognese painting (the Louvre has no shortage of them), says a lot about the real motivations behind this project.
It should be noted that in an exhibition…