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An exhibition at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt shows that the baroque painter’s idealised figures are certainly an acquired taste, writes Christopher Baker
Had Domenico Zampieri – Domenichino – been a happy man, he might never have painted a landscape. For all his talent, he was by nature timid and unsure, traits that invited jealous enemies – “of whom no painter ever had more”, as one Victorian apologist put it – to persecute him both as a person and as an artist. His landscapes – a low genre of art in the 17th century – were