"Madonna del Velo" with Cardinal Paolo Emilio Sfondrati.

Madonna del Velo with Cardinal Paolo Emilio Sfondrati, painted in 1608 and now in the Palace Museum at Wilanów near Warsaw, is an early Roman-period work combining devotional Marian imagery with the portrait of one of the most powerful churchmen in Counter-Reformation Rome. Cardinal Sfondrati (1561-1618) was a member of one of the great papal families — nephew of Pope Gregory XIV — and a significant patron of arts and letters who maintained close relationships with the leading painters working in Rome during the early seventeenth century. The donor-portrait format, in which a real person is depicted alongside or in the presence of a sacred figure, had been standard in Italian religious art since the medieval period, and Reni's version situates the Cardinal in devotional relationship to the Madonna with the natural ease of the fully developed tradition. The Palace Museum at Wilanów, housed in the seventeenth-century summer palace of King John III Sobieski outside Warsaw, is one of Poland's most important art collections.

The composition juxtaposes the idealized Madonna and Child with the naturalistic portrait of the cardinal, creating a contrast between heavenly grace and earthly authority. Reni's refined palette and smooth modeling serve the devotional subject, while the cardinal's portrait demonstrates his capacity for convincing likeness.