The Union of Drawing and Color

In the art talk of Reni's Italy, painting was often split into two rival virtues. Disegno, drawing, was the strength claimed for Florence and Rome, and colore, colour, the strength of Venice. Around 1620 to 1625 Reni turned that argument into a pair of figures on a round canvas. A young man drawing on a sheet of paper puts his arm around a woman holding a palette and brushes, the two arts at peace. The picture may already have been in Amsterdam by 1626, in a merchant's collection there. In 1685 the painter Gabriel Blanchard bought it in Flanders for Louis XIV, and he had a personal stake in the subject. In November 1671 he had stood up at the French royal academy of painting and argued that colour counted at least as much as drawing, against colleagues who treated it as mere surface. The tondo went from Versailles to the Louvre in 1797, and spent most of the 20th century on deposit at the château of Maisons-Laffitte.