St. Peter Repenting

The Expertise

Reni became famous in the history of art also for his images of saints, or grieving Christ, painted in half figure and devotedly looking up to the heavens as a sign of prayer or intimate uneasiness. A masterly example of such tendency is this painting, a work of his full maturity characterized by a thick and rich pictorial texture, which is itself a metaphor of the emotional power expressed by the Master’s hand, that stands as one of the most outstanding models of the kind within the artistic development of the great Bolognese. One must stress the principle of the chromatic mixture with which Reni transfers onto a stylistic level that emotional dimension that, in its most elevated forms such as these, never slipped into rhetoric instead always remained anchored to a kind of noble Classicism which he taught to the whole world.