Guido Reni

Guido Reni painted with a graceful, classical beauty that made him one of the most admired painters of the seventeenth century. His figures have smooth, pale skin, upturned eyes and elegant poses, and his colours grew lighter and more silvery as he aged.

Born in Bologna, he trained with Denys Calvaert and then at the Carracci academy. In Rome he painted the Aurora fresco in the Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi, and he returned to Bologna, where he ran a large workshop. His Massacre of the Innocents is in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna, and the Louvre and the Prado each hold many of his paintings.

Atalanta and Hippomenes, known in versions in the Prado and Capodimonte, shows his fluid, balletic figures.