Giovanni Lanfranco

Stand under the dome of Sant'Andrea della Valle in Rome and look up, and the ceiling seems to dissolve into open sky crowded with rising figures. Giovanni Lanfranco painted it between 1625 and 1627, and visitors at the time had genuinely not seen anything like it, a whole cupola turned into one dizzying, swirling vision of the Virgin carried to heaven.

Lanfranco came from Parma, where as a young man he had studied the domes Correggio painted a century earlier, and he brought that soft, spiralling illusion south to Rome. The commission came with a rivalry attached. The church had given the pendentives below to Domenichino, a painter of the opposite temperament, all calm and clear order, and the two men worked side by side in open competition, whirlwind against stillness.

Lanfranco later moved to Naples, where his illusionistic ceilings shaped a whole generation of southern painters. Two of them, Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena, went on to fill churches across the city with the same kind of open, sky-borne heights he had built in Rome.