section_path: Culture/Visual art
section_name: Visual art
paragraph_text: Visual art
  
  The history of Italian visual arts is significant to Western painting. Roman art was influenced by Greece and can be taken as a descendant of ancient Greek painting. The only surviving Roman paintings are wall paintings. These may contain the first examples of trompe-l'œil, pseudo-perspective, and pure landscape.
  
  The Italian Renaissance is considered to be the golden age of painting, spanning from the 14th through the mid-17th centuries and having significant influence outside Italy. Artists such as Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Tintoretto, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian took painting to a higher level through the use of perspective. Michelangelo was active as a sculptor and his works include his David, Pietà, and Moses.
  
  In the 15th and 16th centuries, the High Renaissance gave rise to a stylised art known as Mannerism. In place of the balanced compositions and rational approach to perspective that characterised art at the dawn of the 16th century, the Mannerists sought instability, artifice, and doubt. The unperturbed faces and gestures of Piero della Francesca and the calm Virgins of Raphael, were replaced by the troubled expressions of Pontormo and emotional intensity of El Greco.
  
  In the 17th century, among the greatest painters of Italian Baroque are Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Carlo Saraceni, and Bartolomeo Manfredi. In the 18th century, Italian Rococo was mainly inspired by French Rococo. Italian Neoclassical sculpture focused, with Antonio Canova 's nudes, on the idealist aspect of the movement.
  
  In the 19th century, Romantic painters included Francesco Hayez, and Francesco Podesti. Impressionism was brought from France to Italy by the Macchiaioli; Realism by Gioacchino Toma and Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. In the 20th century, with Futurism, Italy rose again as a seminal country for evolution in painting and sculpture. Futurism was succeeded by the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, who exerted an influence on the Surrealists.