particular, upon an unmannered design that is given optical verisimilitude through the manipulation of pure, saturated colors and the atmospheric effects of light and shadow. Two of his famous paintings are ‘The Assumption of the Virgin Mary’ and ‘A Holy Woman at the Tomb of Christ’. In the 1590s he went to Rome to decorate the gallery in the Palazzo Farnese. This ceiling became highly influential on the development of painting during the seventeenth century. Its exuberance and colour was picked up on by later Baroque painters while the classicising aspects of its design (disegno) influenced painters who followed the more classical cannon. Other influential painters during this early period who influenced the development of Baroque painting included Peter Paul Rubens, Giovanni Lanfranco, Artemesia Gentileschi and Guercino, whilst artists such as Guido Reni and Domenico Zampieri known as Domenichino, pursued a more classical approach. Italian High Baroque painting The principal painter of the Roman High Baroque, a period that spanned several papal reigns from 1623 to 1667, was Pietro da Cortona. His baroque manner is clearly evident in paintings that he executed for the Sacchetti family in the 1620s and the vault fresco in the Palazzo Barberini (finished 1639) in Rome. During the 1630s, Cortona had a debate at the Accademia di San Luca, the painting academy in Rome, with Andrea Sacchi, a painter with classicising trends, about the perceived differences between their painting styles. The argument essentially concerned the number of figures in a painting and was couched in literary terms, with Cortona arguing for an ‘epic’ approach with an abundance of figures and Sacchi making the case for ‘tragedy’ with fewer figures to convey the messages in a painting. Baroque painters such as Cortona, Giovan Battista Gaulli and Ciro Ferri continued to flourish alongside the classical trend represented by painters such as Sacchi and Nicolas Poussin, but even a classicising painter like Sacchi's pupil Carlo Maratta was influenced in his use of colour by the Baroque. In the 1672, Gian Pietro Bellori's ‘Lives of the artists’ was published. This promoted classical idealism in art so artists of this trend were included (so was Caravaggio) but some of the leading artists of the seventeenth century were omitted such as Cortona, the sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini and the architect Francesco Borromini. Later Italian Baroque painting Monumental ceiling frescoes mainly date to the latter part of the seventeenth century. Some were dramatically