Le Massacre des Innocents

Reni painted this around 1611 for a family chapel in Bologna, though he seems to have worked it up in Rome, where he had been studying ancient sculpture and the shock of Caravaggio at close range. The subject is the Gospel story of Herod ordering the killing of Bethlehem's infants, and it could easily have become pure horror. Instead Reni arranges the panic like a piece of music, each figure answered by a mirroring one across the canvas, mothers fleeing on one side and soldiers striking on the other. In the very centre, isolated, he places a single raised dagger. It became one of the most admired paintings in Bologna, the reason later writers nicknamed him the divine Guido.