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| Guido Cagnacci Glory of St Valerian ca. 1642-44 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Civica di Forlì |
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| Guido Cagnacci Glory of St Mercurialis of Forlì ca. 1642-44 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Civica di Forlì |
"Born in 1601 in the small village of Santarcangelo, Guido Cagnacci spent his early life in Romagna. By 1618 he was studying painting in Bologna, and in the early 1620s is documented living in Rome. He was back in Romagna by the mid-1620s, producing idiosyncratic pictures for religious and aristocratic patrons in the principal cities of the region – Rimini, Forlì, and Faenza – and in smaller centers, such as Montegridolfo, Saludecio, and his birthplace of Santarcangelo. For almost ten years, in the 1650s, Cagnacci was based in Venice, before moving in 1658 to Vienna, the imperial capital, where he died in 1663. . . . While Cagnacci's pictorial language was influenced by some of the greatest Italian Baroque painters – the Carracci, Guercino, and Guido Reni – his figurative style remained individual and highly recognizable, particularly after the late 1630s, with a distinctive manner influenced by Reni's languid late works. In large part because of its originality, Cagnacci's work was almost entirely forgotten during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The rediscovery of his oeuvre took place in Italy in the 1950s, but remains little known outside of Italy. In 1952 the Italian art historian Cesare Gnudi wrote about two of Cagnacci's canvases [directly above] that were made for the Cathedral of Forlì. Gnudi's lyrical description could as well apply to most of Cagnacci's paintings: They possess a sensuous beauty, an exuberant life that expands into a spectacular vision, a magnificent and joyful ballet; a world that delights itself in an enchanted game of brilliant colors, of dazzling lights, of sounds, and at the same time discovers a reality which is closer and more earthly, a new, much abbreviated relationship with nature: all of these, we have seen, are typical seventeenth-century notes, but expressed in such singular form that it can be easily said that they add a new accent to the history of Italian painting."
– curator's notes from a 2017 exhibition at the Frick Collection, New York
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| Guido Cagnacci Penitent Magdalen ca. 1660 oil on canvas Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena |
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| Guido Cagnacci Penitent Magdalen (detail) ca. 1660 oil on canvas Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena |
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| Guido Cagnacci Death of Cleopatra ca. 1660-62 oil on canvas Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan |
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| Guido Cagnacci Death of Cleopatra ca. 1645-55 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Guido Cagnacci Judith with the Head of Holofernes ca. 1640-45 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna |
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| Guido Cagnacci David with the Head of Goliath ca. 1645-50 oil on canvas Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
"Among the Reni succession in Bologna only two artists stand out, namely Simone Cantarini (1612-48) and Guido Cagnacci (1601-63) . . . the latter, who sought his fortune in Vienna and became court painter to Emperor Leopold I, for breaking away from the orthodox Baroque classicists and creating some works of great poignancy in strange violet and bluish tones."
– Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750, originally published in 1958, revised by Joseph Connors and Jennifer Montagu and reissued by Yale University Press in 1999
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| Guido Cagnacci David with the Head of Goliath ca. 1655 oil on canvas Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, South Carolina |
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| Guido Cagnacci Allegory of Painting before 1663 oil on canvas Collezione Venceslao di Persio, Pescara |
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| Guido Cagnacci Allegory of Human Life ca. 1650 oil on canvas Collezione Cavallini Sgarbi, Ferrara |
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| attributed to Guido Cagnacci St Sebastian before 1663 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Guido Cagnacci Lucretia ca. 1660 oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Art de Lyon |
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| Guido Cagnacci Reclining Nude ca. 1630-40 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Guido Cagnacci Portrait of Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor ca. 1658 oil on canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |