Annibale Carracci

When Annibale Carracci came to Rome in the 1590s, Cardinal Odoardo Farnese handed him a long gallery ceiling to decorate, and what he painted there set the course of the next century. Between about 1597 and 1601 he covered it with 'The Loves of the Gods', a crowd of mythological couples framed to look like gilded pictures, with living nude figures propped among them, the whole thing full of muscle, warmth and wit. Young painters came to Rome for years just to copy it.

Behind that confidence lay a program. Back home in Bologna, Annibale had helped found a teaching academy with his brother Agostino and his cousin Ludovico, built on drawing from life and the study of Raphael and the Venetians. They meant to pull Italian painting out of Mannerism, the elegant, artificial style then in fashion, and back toward solid, observed bodies.

That grounding fed the whole Baroque age that followed. Annibale's last years were bleak. He fell into a deep melancholy, all but stopped painting, and died in Rome in 1609, buried at his own wish near Raphael in the Pantheon.