The exhibition called “The Age of Correggio and the Carracci: Emilian Painting of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries”— now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York—began its American tour at the National Gallery in Washington in December.[1] It is immense, with two hundred paintings, which are in many cases colossal. In Washington, it was installed not in the Gallery’s East Wing, the building provided for temporary shows, nor on the ground floor of the original main building, where such shows can still occasionally be seen. Rather, most exceptionally, it took up twenty-three galleries of the main floor. Even in that much space, to be sure, any exhibition can get swallowed up in the museum’s three-block-long structure. The beaux-arts building, with its very high ceilings, reflects, even a bit insistently, the status of the art museum as the successor-occupant of a royal palace, the Louvre in particular. This makes complete sense for the later part of this show, which is dominated not by the Carracci but by their successors, Guido Reni and Guercino.

These two painters, who surely define as well as any whatever we mean by “academic”—either approvingly or scornfully—got respectively an entire grand room and large parts of two others in Washington. The single most effective hanging, at the end of a long range of galleries, was of a Reni which in fact usually hangs in a key spot in the Louvre. This picture presents Reni’s image, from Greek mythology, of the centaur Nessus swimming and