Annibale Carracci's Bolognese pupils, foremost Domenichino, Albani, Reni and Lanfranco, had become the leading painters in Rome following Carracci's death in 1609. (After Caravaggio left Rome in 1606, his followers there had not competed successfully with the Bolognese for fresco or altarpiece commissions).
One of Domenichino's masterpieces, his frescoes of Scenes of the Life of Saint Cecilia in the Polet Chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi, had been commissioned in 1612 and completed in 1615.
Concurrently he had painted his first, and most celebrated, altarpiece, The Last Communion of St. Jerome, for the church of San Girolamo della Carità (signed and dated, 1614).
It subsequently would be judged as being comparable to Raphael's great Transfiguration and even as "the best picture in the world."
Domenichino had by late 1616 designed the coffered ceiling with The Assumption of the Virgin in Santa Maria in Trastevere; and he had begun a cycle of ten frescoes depicting the Life of Apollo in a garden pavilion of the Villa Aldobrandini (Belvedere) in Frascati, where he was assisted by Giovanni Battista Viola, a Bolognese artist who, like Domenichino himself, is a pioneer in the development of classicistic landscape painting.
Francesco Albani had completed the Choir frescoes at the newly remodeled (by Pietro da Cortona) church of Santa Maria della Pace during 1612-14, and in 1616 he paints for the cardinal Fabrizio Verospceiling frescoes of Apollo and the Seasons at Palazzo Verospi in Via del Corso.
