Assumption of the Virgin

Guido Reni painted Assumption of the Virgin around 1637, a large-scale altarpiece depicting the Virgin's miraculous ascent into heaven surrounded by angels and apostles. Reni's late style — applied here in one of his most ambitious religious commissions — shows the increasingly pale, almost translucent palette of his final decades: the silvery blues and whites that give his late paintings a quality of ethereal dematerialization quite different from the warmer, more physically substantial coloring of his earlier work. The Virgin rises in a swirling aureole of angels with the effortless grace that was Reni's characteristic contribution to sacred painting — divine movement rendered as physical beauty.

The ascending Virgin is rendered in Reni's late silvery palette, the idealized figure surrounded by angels in a composition of weightless, ascending movement that embodies his mature vision of divine beauty.