Whilst the Venetian Sebastiano del Piombo became almost Florentine under the influence of Michelangelo, outside but near Venice, a true master arose. Can we speak of a school of Parma? It includes only one great name, that of Correggio, and his art is like a lovely flowering branch detached from the Venetian tree. But Correggio was an original man who imitated no one. He was a brilliant decorator who was undaunted by the greatest tasks. He was a colourist and a harmonist. He achieved grace even in vast compositions like that of the cupola in Parma, and he painted some of the loveliest of Italian easel pictures—Antiope, the Marriage of St. Catherine and Mercury and Venus. By his natural affinities he recalls at once Titian, Leonardo and Raphael.
Correggio's purely instinctive example suggested to the Carracci the reasoned doctrine which the founders of the Bolognese School applied. There had been painters in Bologna before them, even in the Middle Ages, and in the time of Raphael Francia had a great reputation. But the true Bolognese School, which set out to create a style common to all Italy, formed of the finest elements derived from the greatest masters, was the outcome of the initiative of Louis (1555-1619), Agostino (1557-1602) and Anni bale Carracci (1562-1609). They founded their celebrated acad emy in 1585 in their native town which was, and is, the seat of a great university. If they were in part responsible for what was later known as "academism," that is, an art made of formulas learned by rote, their personal work was by no means negligible. They had ambition and the strength to respond to it. They were great decorators as the Farnese Gallery bears witness ; and their pupils, Guido, Guercino and Domenichino deserve almost equal esteem. The Aurora of Guido in the Palazzo Rospigliosi is the only large decorative work which is not too unworthy to recall the compositions of Raphael in the Farnesina. Guercino com posed large altarpieces with a feeling at once dramatic and pic turesque. And Domenichino, less of an improvisor and more unequal than his colleagues, sometimes, as in his charming picture in the Casino Borghese, the Bath of Diana, recaptured beyond academism the accent and the freshness of the great painters of the Renaissance.
But the true original talent of the time grew up outside the schools. Michelangelo da Caravaggio (1569-1609) was as tem peramental in his painting as in his wild life. He painted still life subjects, that is to say, he painted—what had never yet been done—for the pleasure of painting independently of subject, and he carried his robust naturalism, his violent contrasts of crude light and opaque shadow, his taste for unusual and striking scenery and a kind of picaresque style, not without nobility, into his great religious subjects. His influence was immense, firstly through those who were more or less directly his disciples, such as Manfredi and Domenico Feti, both very good painters, the latter showing in several pictures a sincere observation of rustic life ; but it extended further. The Genoese and Neapolitan Schools derived from him, and the great movement of Spanish painting in the 17th century was connected with these Schools. In the following generations the best endowed painters oscillated be tween the lessons of Caravaggio and the Carracci. The romantic Salvator Rosa and the fertile improvisor, Luca Giordano, covered the vaults of churches and the ceilings of palaces with brilliant compositions which heralded the work of Tiepolo.
Venice, however, showed during the last period of her splendour the same independence as in her golden age. Neither academism chilled her liveliness, nor the influence of Caravaggio dulled her palette. In the mid-i8th century, in the midst of a decadence from which she alone in Italy escaped, she had her imitators in the painting of manners and landscape in Longhi, Canaletto (1697-1768) and Guardi (1712-1793). Whilst Piazzetta, a vir tuoso of the brush, displayed in his easel pictures a freedom and an accent which were quite modern and seemed to be already of the 19th century. G. B. Tiepolo (1692-1769) was a decorator of the great lineage of Veronese, with a colouration which was less powerful and delicate, but more luminous and truly aerial ; and he had a Romanesque feeling and a festive liveliness when he portrayed the Palazzo Labia the Story of Antony and Cleopatra, his masterpiece. He is the last great Italian painter.