Guido Reni in the Prado: copies and copying

The Museo del Prado is one of the institutions outside of Italy that holds the largest number of Guido Reni works, both originals and copies, most of which come from Royal Collections. This article studies various copies through documentary research and stylistic analysis, recognising the models they replicated and, for the first time, categorising them. In this way, the different degrees of proximity to Reni’s studio are defined and it is proposed that one of them is an original by the master. In addition, it explores the phenomenon of copying Reni’s works within the Museum in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.