Alessandro Magnasco

Most Italian Baroque painters filled bright altarpieces with saints in glory. Alessandro Magnasco went the other way. He worked small and dark, in quick nervous strokes that make everything seem to flicker and shiver, and he crowded his canvases with monks at prayer, gypsies round a fire, soldiers, beggars, witches and inquisitors, tiny elongated figures lost in storm-tossed ruins and gloomy convents.

He was Genoese, born in 1667, and known as Lissandrino, "little Alessandro", for his short stature, though he spent most of his working life in Milan. His restless, phantom-lit manner was very much his own. It had almost no followers, and after his death it slipped out of fashion, brushed aside for a long time as an oddity.

The 20th century found him again. Collectors and museums came to prize exactly the strangeness that once left him stranded, and his convent and storm scenes now hang from Milan to museums abroad. Magnasco had gone back to Genoa in his last years, and died there in 1749.