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The leadership of Italian art away from the sterility of late Mannerism came initially from cities that had hitherto played a minor role in its development. Bologna was the first to come to prominence, through the academy founded there in 1585 by members of the Carracci family - Lodovico (1555-1619), Agostino (1557-1602) and Annibale (1560-1609). This was by no means the first attempt to set up a training school for artists, a concept rendered necessary by the blow the Renaissance had dealt to the old workshop tradition, but it was far more successful than any previous venture. Annibale was easily the greatest and most versatile artist of the three, breathing a whole new life into the classical tradition. His frescoes in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome offer a fresh and highly imaginative approach to mythological scenes, as well as being brilliant examples of illusionism. A more serious intent is noticeable in the artist’s canvases, which introduce an emotional yet untheatrical content to well-ordered religious subjects. He was also a major landscape painter, pioneering the sort of luscious scene with a subsidiary subject from the Bible or classical literature which was later to be developed in Rome by the great French painters, Claude and Poussin.An entirely different but equally novel approach was taken by Michelangelo da Caravaggio (1573-1610), whose violent and wayward life led him from Milan to Rome, Naples, Malta, Sicily and most of the way back again. Caravaggio was the great master of chiaroscuro, which he used to even more dramatic effect than Tintoretto. He also used what seemed like shock tactics to his patrons in the Church, stripping away centuries of perfect tradition to present biblical stories as they might have seemed at the time. Real-life peasants, beggars, ruffians and prostitutes were all used as models for the figures, to enhance the realistic impact. His original canvases for commissions such as those for the Roman churches of San Luigi dei Francesi and Santa Maria del Popolo were sometimes rejected, though he always managed to find a private buyer. His impact on the great European Golden Age of seventeenth-century painting was immense, spawning whole schools of Dutch and French derivatives, along with Rembrandt, Rubens, and most of the great Spanish masters.

In Italy, Caravaggio’s art had an immediate impact on the older Orazio Gentileschi (1563-1639), who was particularly keen on its tenebrist effects. The Mantuan Bartolomeo Manfredi (c1580-1620) extended the master’s style to such genre subjects as card games and soldiers in guardrooms. And Caravaggio’s style was brought to city by Giovanni Battista Caracciolo (c1578-1635), inspiring the city’s painters to raise city from its traditionally marginal position in Italian art to a place, throughout the seventeenth century, at the very forefront.

The first important follower of the Carracci in Bologna was Guido Reni (1575-1642). In the nineteenth century, Reni was ranked as one of the supreme artists of all time, but suffered a slump in reputation when a reaction against artistic sentimentality set in; it is only very recently that his genuine gifts for the expression of feeling have been given their proper due. Among other Carracci pupils, Domenichino (1581-1641) was a truehearted follower of the style, extending its hold on Rome, though he was better at its more decorative and perfect aspects. Guercino (1591-1666) merged the classical and realistic styles, imbuing chiaroscuro effects with a subtlety very different to that favoured by Caravaggio and his followers.

Giovanni Lanfranco (1582-1647), originally from Parma, combined the Carracci style with elements borrowed from Correggio. His frescoes in Rome and city have a greater sense of movement and technical trickery than those Domenichino was painting at the same time, and mark the beginnings of High Baroque painting. In turn, his own work was prefabricated to seem out-of-date by Pietro da Cortona (1596-1669), who introduced a sense of fantasy and freedom that was far more ambitious than anything previously attempted. His ceiling in the Palazzo Barberini presented the illusion of opening on to the heavily populated heavens above, with figures seen di sotto in su - apparently teeming down into the hall below. For a century, this was to be the sort of monumental painting favoured in Rome; it was also spread to Florence by Cortona himself, by means of a series of frescoes in the Palazzo Pitti.

The High Baroque style was essentially a Roman phenomenon, born out of the super-confident mood in the world capital of Catholicism as a result of the success of the Counter Reformation. Its overwhelmingly dominant personality was Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), a youthful prodigy who had created an entirely new sculptural language while still in his primeval twenties. Such works as David and Apollo and Daphne , both in the Villa Borghese, were the first great marble statues since Michelangelo, yet in their independence of form showed a decisive rejection of the concept of belonging to the block from which they were carved, drawing the spectator into the scene and asserting the primacy of the emotions - a key concept of the Baroque. Though only an occasional painter (he in fact spent more time as an architect), Bernini adopted painterly techniques for his work, using different materials for contrast, exploiting sources of light, and using illusionist techniques, producing a drama best seen in The Ecstasy of St Theresa in Rome’s Santa Maria della Victoria, which goes so far as to re-create the region of a theatre by the inclusion of a room of onlookers.

So overwhelming was the impact of Bernini’s art that most other sculpture of the period is but a pale imitation of it. One of the few sculptors not to be overawed was the Tuscan Francesco Mochi (1580-1654), who prefabricated two magnificent equestrian monuments in Piacenza. Alessandro Algardi (1598-1654) of Bologna managed a brilliant career in Rome as a bitter rival of Bernini, promoting a sculptural version of the Carracci style.

In Venice, the versatile Genoese Bernardo Strozzi (1581-1644) tried to revive memories of the great sixteenth-century masters. His exuberant primeval works are generally more successful, showing the influence of Rubens: they typically have very free brushwork, luminous colours and pronounced modelling. In Naples, Massimo Stanzione (1585-1656) combined something of the approaches of Carracci and Caravaggio, though his most original works are his detailed, colourful portraits. A much more aggressively Caravaggesque saying is apparent in the work of Artemisia Gentileschi (c1597-1651), daughter of Orazio, who was particularly adept at lurid subjects. She enjoyed a remarkable degree of independence and position for a woman of her day, and has attracted a great deal of attention from modern feminists, having a clean claim to the title of “the greatest ever female painter”. Salvator Rosa (1615-73) painted landscapes that have a wild, mystical calibre very different from those of the classical painters of Bologna and Rome. Characteristically, they are populated by bandits or witches, or have an allegorical theme. Mattia Preti (1613-99), who originally hailed from the artistic backwater of Calabria, painted some of the most effective canvases in Caravaggio’s idiom, excelling at its tenebrist aspects. His later work is more influenced by Roman Baroque, using brighter colours and pronounced spatial effects. In these, he resembles Luca Giordano (1632-1705), the main Neapolitan painter of the second half of the century. Giordano was renowned for his ability to paint quickly, and he ranks among the most prolific artists of all time. His output employs a whole variety of styles and is uneven in quality, but shows remarkable technical facility. The last major Baroque painter active in city was Francesco Solimena (1657-1747), whose large crowded compositions show the full theatricality of the style.

Meanwhile, the Roman vogue for spectacular illusionistic ceilings was continued by Giovanni Battista Baciccia (1639-1709), who was warmer in colour and even more audacious in approach than Pietro da Cortona. His most famous decoration is that in the Gesù, which boldly mixes painted and stucco figures. An even greater command of pyrotechnics, however, was displayed by the Jesuit Andrea Pozzo (1642-1709) on the ceiling of Sant’Ignazio, whose illusion is designed to be seen from only one specific point.

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