Ludovico Carracci

In Bologna in the 1580s three members of the Carracci family decided that painting had grown mannered and hollow, and set out to fix it. The oldest and steadiest of them was Ludovico, who with his younger cousins Annibale and Agostino opened a teaching academy built on drawing from life and study of the great masters.

Their reform pulled painting back toward nature, solid bodies, real light, direct feeling, and it helped launch the whole Baroque age. While the cousins went off to make their names in Rome, Ludovico largely stayed in Bologna, running the school and filling the city's churches with warm, tender altarpieces.

He was the teacher as much as the star, and a line of important Bolognese painters, Guido Reni, Domenichino, and Guercino among them, grew out of his academy. He died in Bologna in 1619, still at the head of the workshop he had helped make the most influential in Italy.