Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini

In 1708 a British diplomat sailing home from Venice brought two painters with him, and one of them was Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini. He and Marco Ricci, a landscape specialist, were the first Venetian artists to set up shop in England, and what they carried north was a whole way of decorating a ceiling: airy, bright, quickly brushed, full of floating figures and open sky.

Pellegrini had learned his trade in Venice, folding the grand manner of Paolo Veronese, the 16th-century master, into the lighter Baroque of his own day. His timing was good. Wealthy patrons across northern Europe wanted their staircases and halls turned into painted heaven, and few local artists could do it at speed. He worked at Kimbolton Castle for the Earl of Manchester, the diplomat who had brought him over, and painted the dome at Castle Howard in Yorkshire, a scheme lost to a fire in 1940.

He never really settled. Over about 30 years he moved between England, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and France, one of the traveling decorators who spread the Venetian Rococo across the continent. Back in Venice he had married Angela Carriera, sister of Rosalba Carriera, the pastel portraitist whose delicate style was then the toast of European courts.