Guido Reni

Guido Reni was born in Bologna in 1575, the son of musicians, and at nine he was apprenticed to a Flemish painter working in the city. He soon moved to the academy run by the Carracci brothers, the workshop that was pulling Italian painting back toward clarity and grace after the twisting excesses of late Mannerism.

His most admired work is a ceiling. In 1614, for a garden house beside a cardinal's palace in Rome, Reni painted Aurora, the goddess of dawn, scattering flowers ahead of Apollo's chariot as the sun-god rides out over a waking landscape. The frieze runs light and even across the vault, closer to a Raphael relief than to the deep shadows Caravaggio had made fashionable a few years earlier in the same city.

Reni divided his life between Rome and Bologna, turning out altarpieces whose upturned faces and soft colour were copied for two centuries. He was also a compulsive gambler who ran up heavy debts in his last years, painting faster and looser to pay them. He died in Bologna in 1642 and was buried in the church of San Domenico there.