Rome was the centre where Baroque art originated and from where it spread. The great non-Italian artists of the first half of the seventeenth century, Rubens and Rembrandt, Velasquez and Poussin, could not have developed as they did without direct or indirect contact with the artistic events in Rome. Even though conditions radically changed after 1650, Rome must be given a large share in any consideration of European art during the second half of the century.

All the great artists of the first generation of the Baroque—Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), Caravaggio (1573–1610), Guido Reni (1575–1642), and the architect Carlo Maderao (1556–1629)—died long before 1650. The Fleming Rubens (b. 1577) died in Antwerp in 1640. Most of the great masters of the next generation, those mainly born in the last decade of the sixteenth century, were still alive, among them Alessandro Algardi (1595– 1654), Andrea Sacchi (1599–1661), Francesco Borromini (1599–1667), Pietro da Cortona (1596–1669), the Neapolitan sculptor and architect Cosimo Fanzago (1591–1678), the Venetian architect Baldassare Longhena (1598–1682), and the greatest of all, Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680). Of the non-Italians of this almost unbelievably strong generation Velasquez (b. 1599) died in 1660, Poussin (b. 1593) in 1665, Frans Hals (b. 1580), the oldest of this group, in 1666, Rembrandt (b. 1606) in 1669, and Claude Lorrain (b. 1600) in 1682. All these artists reached their full maturity in the fourth and fifth decades and only few lived through the third and into the fourth quarter of the century.