METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: GALLERIA 601: Baroque Painting in Italy.

Speranza

At the end of the sixteenth century, artists such as Scipione Pulzone responded to the religious shift of the Counter-Reformation with profoundly pious works.

Over the next fifty years, altarpieces developed into the lavish canvases of Guido Reni and Guercino.

Cardinals and princes competed to decorate their churches and palaces with vibrantly painted, often theatrically staged pictures that treated subjects from the Bible, on the one hand, and ancient history or mythology, on the other. Altarpieces and gallery pictures shared a monumental format and grandiosity of composition. Antiquity, especially classical sculpture, was an important influence on artists such as Andrea Sacchi. In this period and after, Italy continued to assert its central position in European art.