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also enjoyed exchanging banter with my formidable gallery manager, Emily
Farrow. Time spent with Minai was always immensely pleasurable, humorous
and, sometimes, even informative. It was through him that Reni’s portrait of
Camillo Borghese came to the gallery.

In consequence, it was manifest that I should be on the lookout for works by
Guido. Alas, they were all too few and far between. The first was a St Francis
which I sold to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City (Fig. 2)4. The
painting was an intensely passionate Counter-Reformation statement, in some
ways the Bolognese equivalent of the great Castiglione St. Francis I originally
sold to Barbara Johnson and later resold to the Metropolitan Museum. The
delicacy and transparency of the glazes was remarkable and the painting’s
immaculate condition was probably due to the fact that it had remained in the
Segni and Salina collections in Bologna until the late nineteenth century. The
second Reni that all too briefly passed through my hands was a masterpiece.
This was the ex-Barberini Mary Magdalen (Fig. 3), one of the most copied of all
Reni’s compositions and a paragon of reflective pathos and exquisitely sensitive Fig. 3.
lush drapery5. The third painting also passed through the gallery rather briefly
in 1988. This was probably the prime version of the Martyrdom of St. Appolonia, oil on copper, 44 x 33cm, as it
was a Barberini fidecommisso picture (Fig. 4), which almost certainly predates the similar copper, formerly in the
Feigen Collection, New York, and sold at Sotheby’s in London on 9 July 2008, lot 72. The closeness of the two
virtually identical compositions is eloquent testimony to the demand for Guido’s works and to the ability of the
studio, almost certainly with the direct intervention of the master himself, to fabricate versions6.

In 1986 we bought a very ‘Reniesque’ composition of Joseph and Potiphar (Fig. 5) by Giovan Giacomo Sementi
1580 – 1638, a leading member of Guido’s studio in the via delle Pescherie7. Together with Francesco Gessi

4. St.Francis Adoring the Cross, oil on canvas, 82 x 67cm, see Baroque III, Matthiesen Gallery, 1986, no.4, pp. 44-47.
5. Now in a private collection near St. Moritz.
6. See p.75, note 2 in this catalogue.
7. See Paintings from Emilia 1500 – 1700, Matthiesen Gallery, 1987, no. 26, pp. 96-98. The painting was previously attributedto

Cantarini but was also probably retouched by Reni himself; see Emilio Negro, ‘Giovan Giacomo Sementi’ in La Scuola di Guido

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