Massimo Stanzione

Naples in the early 1600s was the most crowded, competitive art city in Italy, and its painters had a reputation for guarding their turf by any means. Into that world came Massimo Stanzione, who found a way to stand apart. Where the dominant style was the harsh, shadowed realism that followed Caravaggio, Stanzione softened it with the grace and warm colour of the Bolognese painters, and his contemporaries began calling him the Neapolitan Guido Reni, after the most admired artist of the age.

He ran the busiest studio in the city and filled its churches with altarpieces. His masterpiece is usually named as the Lamentation over the Dead Christ, painted around 1638 for the Certosa di San Martino, the grand monastery above Naples, where the figures grieve with a tenderness unusual for the local taste.

For decades he shared the top of the profession with the Spaniard Jusepe de Ribera, his great rival. Stanzione's end came with the disaster that swept the whole city: the plague of 1656, which killed perhaps half of Naples, and the painter with it.