Painting by Bologna painter Guido Reni “Portrait of a lady in the guise of a sibyl”. The size of the painting is 92 x 74 cm, oil on canvas.
In the period of the full flowering of Italian art, there was a whole phalanx of gifted and brilliant artists who erected a portrait to the degree of a highly elegant picture perpetuating the whole essence of a given person’s character at the moment of its brightest expression. Raphael, Sebastiano del Piombo, Titian, Giorgione, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, Reni, and many other masters became famous for their portraits as much as for historical paintings.
The portrait was becoming more and more important in the activities of artists and in connection with the general direction of these schools was improved mainly in relation to color and light and shade. With the end of the 17th century, mannerism and convention, established in art in general, prevented the portrait from remaining at the height it had reached and even pushed this painting genre to the background.
Nevertheless, in the 17th and 18th centuries such remarkable portrait painters as P. Minyar, G. Rigault, Detroit and N. Largillier in France, Kupetsky, R. Mengs and A. Graf in Germany, Reynolds, Laurens and Gainsboro in England worked, Goya in Spain, Levitsky and Borovikovsky in Russia.
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