Guido Reni (Bologna 1575-1642)
1575, 4 November, Guido Reni was born in Bologna, in via San Felice, to a middle-class family, his father, Daniele, was a musician working for the town seignior. Despite the fact there are precise documents as to his place of birth, there is a still a tradition that began at the end of the 18th century that he was born in Cadenzano a small town in the Apennines in the Emilia region.
1584-93. According to Malvasia, the young Guido left his music studies that his father had entered him for and joined the workshop of the Flemish artist Denis Calvaert, who had been very successful in Bologna, and lived there for around nine years.
1595-98. According to the biographies, when Reni was around 20 he had a crisis that forced him away from Calvaert and to the Natural Academy (the future Incamminati Academy) that the Carracci family had opened in 1563, where he was obviously attracted by the “mannerist novelty of the Carracci, who were taking on the forms of the great 16th century artists and the new more natural and moving air". During this period he had his first pictorial experiences on works of Annibale Carracci and Raffaello. He won a competition, that Ludovico Carracci also took part in, for the decorations for the facade of the Regimental Palace in honour of Pope Clement VIII.
1600, 27 October. Documents hold that the painter was still in Bologna. However he may have made his first short journey to Rome during the Holy Year “to see the works of Annibale, Raffaello and the antique marbles”.
1601, 11 October. He was personally commissioned in Rome for the Martyrdom of Saint Cecilia.
1603. On 18th January the funerals were held in Bologna of Agostino Carracci. Reni was probably present and, together with Francesco Brizio, did the drawings that the engravings were taken from in his memory to decorate his tomb.
1604. A notary deed informs us that Reni was in Bologna on 3 January. On 18 February he was back in Rome and signed a document as Chancellor of the Academy of San Luca; in the summer he painted the cloisters in San Michele in Bosco in Bologna, that various payments are recorded for. In October the same year he went to Loreto to negotiate the decorations of the Treasures of the Holy House, which were then painted by Pomarancio.

1605-1609. He sent the Charity from Rome to Bologna that had been commissioned three years earlier by Angelo Michele Risi. During this time he confirmed his position in Rome as a leading artist: Pope Paul V asked him to decorate two halls in the Vatican and Cardinal Borghese asked him to paint the frescoes in San Gregorio al Celio. A first down-payment of ten scudi is recorded for painting the Paul V Chapel in Monte Cavallo Palazzo (now the Quirinale).
1610. Due to having too much work, in January he had to refuse completing a painting that had already been started, for the Domenicani in Bologna, and he gave them their deposit back. In the same year he successfully completed the decorations for the Paul V Chapel in Monte Cavallo, with help from various assistants. According to recently discovered documents on 25 September he received a first deposit of one hundred scudi for the paintings in the Pope’s Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore; once again the payments were regularly made, with just one interruption from November 1610 to March 1611.
1610-11. Between the end of 1610 and the beginning of 1611, due to disagreement with the Pope’s administrator between the end of the work in Monte Cavallo and the beginning of that in Santa Maria Maggiore, as sources record, he suddenly returned to Bologna, leaving Paul’s Chapel incomplete in the Roman church. During this time he did some very important paintings in his hometown, including the Slaughter of the Babes and Samson.

1612. He was recalled by the Pope and, thanks to the mediation of Cardinal Facchinetti, returned to Rome where he was welcomed with great honour. His work is fully documented there by the news given by historians and various payments. From a notary deed published by F. Bologna, on 16 April the artist was in Naples, where he contacted an attorney to sell a property in Rome. The real reasons for the journey are still unknown, but Bologna makes a cautious suggestion that is was linked with the decorations for the celebrations in Naples 1612 for the alliance marriages between the royal houses of France and Spain.
1613-15. Between October 1613 and June 1615 he painted the fresco in the apse of San Domenico in Bologna, according to the public payments recorded by Father  V. Alce (with a few precise details with respect to previous data). The work was carried out in two phases, with another stay in Rome in between: in Autumn 1613 Reni painted around ¼ of the fresco, and completed it in Spring 1615, in view of the General Chapter called by the Domenicani in the Saint’s Arch during August of the same year.

1614. The artist is known to have been in Rome due to a letter he wrote to Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, legate in Bologna (where he mentioned his future return to Bologna), due to a first deposit he received for the Pieta of the Beggars which was sent to him in Rome on 2 April and due to a letter that Count Barbazzi sent from Bologna to the Duke of Mantova on 3 December, being his trustee, stating that Reni had been in Rome for a few months. It is probable that again during this period, he travelled to and from the two towns on more than one occasion: we know he was in Bologna on 1 November, his final return to this hometown is described by Malvasia as a sudden decision, further to new disagreements with the Pope’s administrator, but he probably intended to return for some time, in view of his number of commitments in Bologna and for “moral and interior reasons of Reni’s artistic process". 

1616. The Pieta of the Beggars was positioned in Bologna, which the artist had probably worked on during the previous year.
1617. On 20 June the Legate in Bologna, Cardinal Capponi called on him for the decorations in Mantova for Ferdinando Gonzaga, but he refused for fear of “mortal infirmity” caused him by fresco painting; according to Malvasia he sent his pupils Gessi and Sementi. The same year he sent the Duke of Mantova the first of four canvases with the Labours of Hercules.
1619. Negotiations began for decorating the Treasure Chapel of San Gennaro in Naples.

1619-21. Various letters from Barbazzi to Gonzaga, from 9 January 1619 to 22 April 1621, document his painting the Hercules collection; they also refer to two other paintings of Venus and the Graces and the Judgement of Paris, of which there is no other news.
1620. On 23 August Reni wrote to a certain Cosimo Mongoli undertaking to finish the decorations in the Sacrament Chapel in Ravenna cathedral, ordered by Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini; the majority of the work was painted by his pupils following the Master’s sketches. Payments are also documented the same year relative to the Saviour for the Church of San Salvatore in Bologna, which was done by Gessi following Reni’s drawings.
1621. On 8 January he received a gift for completing the board of San Salvatore
1622. A letter from Reni to Father Gabrielli di Fano on 23 March makes clear reference to the Annunciation and the Handing of the Keys, both painted for the Church in Valle in Fano a few years from each other. A documented dated 21 April by Gualandi, mentions the commission for the Triumph of Job for the Silk Art in Bologna, but the altarpiece was not completed until 1636. Between 28 April and 17 May the Master was in Naples, to paint the frescoes of the Treasure of San Gennaro and three altarpieces. However economic problems arose with the clients, that the mediation of the Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Carata, was unable to settle. Suddenly Reni went to Rome, and his pupils Gessi and Sementi remained in Naples. Biographers have painted a story of dark, criminal plots about this sudden departure by the local painters: for a documented reconstruction of this episode on Naples, refer to P. Bellucci. Another legend that biographers constantly repeated was his presumed love of gambling, which brought about Reni’s ruin, but only one tangible reference is made to this in a letter from Barbazzi to the Duke of Mantova (20 August), where he talks of the painter’s “extreme need” “being, as your highness knows, a terrible squanderer".
1625. He signed and dated the portrait of Cardinal Roberto Ubaldini. From a letter dated 23 August, he was working on the Trinity altarpiece for the Pilgrims’ Church in Rome.
1627. In a letter sent on 21 January to the Duke of Mantova, Rinaldo Ariosti mentions a Madonna adoring the Sleeping Child by Reni. He left for Rome again the same year, having accepted an assignment from Cardinal Barberini for the frescoes with stories of Attila in St. Peter’s; however (as Reni himself detailed in a letter dated 19 August to Antonio Fibbia in Bologna) he set the condition that nobody should climb on the scaffolding during the work “nobody whatsoever, not even the Cardinals” however, some disagreement arose again and once again he left. According to Malvasia, the negative outcome was due, besides the hostility of the Cardinals in St. Peter’s, by the jealousy of Gessi, his pupil who was also in Rome. The letter dated 19 August mentions the Annunciation, which now hangs in the Louvre (“a board I am painting for France”) and the portrait of Elena (“a painting for the Spanish Ambassador”) that had been commissioned.
1631. At the end of the terrible plague that had hit Bologna the year before, the Town Senate ordered the Vow Frontal as thanks to the Virgin.
1632. He restored the cloister painting in San Michele in Bosco in Bologna. He probably went to Rome again in the same year, given a note in a letter he wrote in 1639 to Ferrante Trotto.
1634. In a letter to Captain F. Incontri in Volterra he mentions a penitent Magdalene, which was painted under his guide by Camillo Incontri, his pupil; the painting still hangs in Volterra cathedral.
1636. The Triumph of Job was placed on the altar of the Art of Silk in the Beggars’ Church in Bologna.
1639. He wrote a letter in Bologna to Ferrante Trotto, refusing to finish a resurrection that was uncompleted when the painter Carlo Bononi died, he declared that he was totally against the idea of tampering with the work of an artist, even to embellish it and he mentions that he was in a certain state of depression: "... I’m beginning not to like myself any more ...; I don’t think I will get through this year”.
1640. On 4 January, Marquis Cospi from Bologna sent the Cleopatra to Prince Carlo Leopoldo of Toscana. On 3 Marche he received a very kind thank you letter from the King of Poland, who he had sent a “Portrait of Europe” through his secretary Puccinelli.
In the same year the panegyric by G. Grimaldi came out for Bacchus and Arianna, which has now been lost, that Malvasia mentioned as "the last of his greatest and most important works”.
1642. In April the altarpiece with the Assumption was delivered to the Confraternity of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Spilamberto (Modena), which had been ordered from Reni around eleven years previous. On 6 August, in Bologna, in the height of summer as Malvasia recollects he went down with a fever which he neglected and which led to his death on 18 August. After being exposed to the people in monk’s clothes, he was buried in the tomb of the Guidolti family, in the church of San Domenico.