Anyone fascinated by the Metropolitan Museum’s recent exhibition of paintings by Evaristo Baschenis, the Northern Italian inventor of the still life of musical instruments, needs only the most minimal excuse to arrange a trip to London. The reason? Not an opportunity to see more works by Baschenis, pleasurable as that might be, but something far more ambitious and comprehensive: an exhibition at the Royal Academy promising a rapid refresher course in the context from which Baschenis emerged. “The Genius of Rome, 1592–1623,”[1] a survey of the formative years of Italian Baroque painting, is a thoughtful examination of the innovations and influence of the period’s most powerful painters—Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, and Peter Paul Rubens.

The three decades explored by the exhibition were a remarkable period in Rome’s long history, a time when th ...

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