Niccolò dell'Abbate

In 1552 a painter from Modena named Niccolo dell'Abbate packed up his Italian training and moved to France, and he did not come back. The French king was rebuilding the palace of Fontainebleau outside Paris into a showcase of the latest Italian taste, and Niccolo went to work there under his countryman Primaticcio, covering walls with elegant, long-limbed mythological figures.

What he carried into France along with the fashionable Mannerist bodies was landscape. Behind his figures he painted wide, silvery river valleys receding into hazy distance, a way of building deep outdoor space that French painters studied closely.

Much of his Fontainebleau work was later destroyed in remodellings, so he is easy to overlook. But that dreamy landscape background reappears, deepened, in the next century's great French painters of the countryside, Claude and Poussin, who inherited a French appetite for it that Niccolo had helped plant.