Guido Reni was an Italian Baroque painter, born in Bologna in 1575, who died there in 1642. He made his name in Rome with the Aurora, a ceiling painted in 1614, then spent most of his life as the leading painter of his home city.
For two centuries collectors called him "the divine Guido". His fame rests on the Archangel Michael in Rome, on saints whose eyes turn to heaven, and on a portrait of a young woman in a white turban, long said to show Beatrice Cenci and long credited to him.
Behind that elegance lived a restless man. Reni gambled all night, ran one of the busiest workshops in Italy and still wished he had the brush of an angel. His Archangel Michael even carries a Roman rumor about the devil it tramples.
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Reni grew up in Bologna, in a family of musicians. The city was then ruled by the pope, as part of the Papal States, the lands the popes governed across central Italy. As a boy he went to train with Denys Calvaert, a Flemish painter who ran a teaching studio there, and he left after a quarrel.
Two other boys from that studio, Francesco Albani and Domenichino, went with him to a newer school in town. It was the academy of the Carracci, three painters of one Bolognese family who made their pupils draw from life, from real models rather than from other pictures.
He joined it in 1595. There Ludovico Carracci backed him, while Ludovico's younger cousin Annibale watched him with suspicion. In 1598 he broke with Ludovico too, in an argument over work he had done and never been paid for.
He had now walked out on two teachers, and he took what they had taught him south to Rome.
A young painter in Rome
Reni reached the city in 1601. He shared rooms at Santa Prassede, an ancient church, with his old companions Albani and Domenichino, and went looking for patrons. In Rome he would also meet the one painter who never had a good word for him.
What You'll Discover
Who alone refused to praise him.
Whose face the devil wears.
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.