L'Aurore

This was never meant to hang on a wall. Reni painted it in 1614 straight onto the ceiling of a small garden house in Rome, built beside the palace for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, one of the great art collectors of the age. You are meant to stand under it and look up. Aurora, the dawn, floats ahead in a golden dress scattering flowers, leading the young sun-god Apollo in his horse-drawn chariot, while a ring of dancing figures, the hours, wheels around him and light spreads over the dark land below. Reni framed the whole scene like a picture set into the plaster, so it reads as a painting hung on the open sky. It is still up on that ceiling, opened to visitors for just one morning at the start of each month.