Polyphemus

Guido Reni's "Polyphemus" (c. 1639-1642) in the Capitoline Museums depicts the one-eyed giant from Homer's Odyssey. This is one of Reni's last major works, painted in the increasingly thin, translucent technique of his final years, when he was burdened by gambling debts and failing health. Guido Reni's refined classicism and ethereal beauty made him one of the most celebrated painters in Europe during his lifetime, his graceful idealized figures expressing a spirituality that appealed equally to Counter-Reformation piety and aristocratic aesthetic sensibility.

The monumental figure is rendered with Reni's late, almost sketch-like technique, the thin paint and pale colors creating an image that seems to hover between material substance and ethereal dissolution.