Blessed Soul

When Guido Reni died in Bologna in 1642, his studio held pictures that patrons had ordered and partly paid for, and many of them were not finished. His biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia tells how Reni's heir gave those patrons a choice, their money back or the canvas as it stood, and few of them preferred the money. This one was intended for Alessandro Sacchetti, of a Roman family of Florentine origin, and it was found in the studio at the painter's death. The blessed soul is a winged nude figure against an almost colourless ground, broken only by the pink drapery wrapped around the body. The Pinacoteca also owns the small oil sketch for it, and technical study of the large canvas shows that Reni kept changing the pose, the legs, the arms and the wings as he worked. The picture is recorded in the Sacchetti collection from 1688, and it came to the Capitoline in 1748 with the rest of the family's paintings.