Guido Reni nella basilica di San Pietro: il soggetto della pala incompiuta

In 1627 Guido Reni, while in his hometown of Bologna, was summoned to Rome by the Barberini family to paint an altarpiece in the Basilica of San Pietro. The master worked on the painting for a few months, leaving it unfinished when he left Rome at the beginning of 1628. According to the reconstruction of Louise Rice, the finished painting would have been the altarpiece depicting the Trinity, then realized by Pietro da Cortona in 1628-1632. Louise Rice, in her fundamental volume on the altars and the altarpieces of St. Peter’s (1997), has thoroughly examined this very complex knot in the history of the decoration of the basilica but it is very probable that things went differently. In fact, it is possible that Guido himself asked, with the consent of Cardinal Francesco Barberini, to paint the altarpiece depicting the encounter of Leo the Great and Attila to deal with the theme of the «istoria» and to compete with Raphael.