Francesco Solimena

For roughly fifty years, if you commissioned a large painting in Naples, the odds were it came out of one man's studio. Francesco Solimena ran the busiest workshop in the city from the 1690s onward, and grew so rich and so celebrated that visiting princes and dealers queued for his work. Neapolitans called him Abate Ciccio, Abbot Ciccio, because he had taken minor clerical orders before painting won out.

He learned the trade from his father Angelo, a provincial painter, then settled in Naples in 1674 and absorbed the theatrical light of Luca Giordano and the darker weight of Mattia Preti, two masters who had shaped the city's taste. Out of them he built his own manner: crowded, swirling scenes lit by sharp diagonals of light, the drama that churches and palaces wanted for their ceilings and altarpieces.

He lived to 89, long enough to watch his own style fall out of fashion as a softer, lighter taste came in. When he died in 1747 he left a fortune and a patent of nobility, and painters from Vienna to Madrid were still working in ways they had picked up by copying him.