RENI, Guido
(b. 1575, Calvenzano, d. 1642, Bologna)

Birth of the Virgin (detail)

1609-11
Fresco
Cappella dell'Annunziata, Palazzo del Quirinale, Rome

The size of the individual figures lends the event a certain solemnity; the women exhibit an ideal monumentality that is indebted to Raphael. That debt is particularly apparent in the figure of the young woman carrying a copper bowl, whose spirited turn of the head ties together what is taking place in the background and the foreground.