Guido Reni, who lived from 1575 to 1642, was an Italian Baroque painter from Bologna. He made his name in Rome with the Aurora ceiling of 1614, then spent most of his life as the leading painter of his home city. For two centuries he was called "the divine Guido" and ranked almost beside Raphael. Today he is remembered for his Archangel Michael in Rome, for saints with their eyes turned to heaven, and for a haunting portrait of a young woman in a white turban.
Most people come for one picture. In the Capuchin church of Santa Maria della Concezione in Rome, Reni's archangel Michael stands over a defeated devil, and for centuries Romans have told each other whose face that devil wears.
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Cardinal Antonio Barberini ordered the altarpiece in 1630, and Reni finished it in 1636. The Barberini were one of the two great noble families of Rome, and they had a rival, the Pamphilj.
According to the legend, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Pamphilj had slandered the painter, and Reni answered with his brush. The devil under the archangel's foot, the story says, has the cardinal's face. Pamphilj later became Pope Innocent X, and the joke only grew.
It is a good story, and the pages that tell it cite no document. What the record does give is a painter who doubted his own hand. In 1672 his biographer Bellori wrote that Reni wished he had the brush of an angel, or the forms of paradise. The man who said it gambled all night, rivaled Caravaggio and ran one of the busiest workshops in Italy.
What You'll Discover
Who alone refused to praise him.
Where dawn still crosses a Roman ceiling.
The glance he painted a hundred ways.
How much he lost at cards.
Who really painted the girl in the turban.
Why a century stopped looking at him.