Isabella d'Este in the context of Portrait of Isabella d'Este (Leonardo)

The Bolognese school of painting, also known as the school of Bologna, flourished between the 16th and 17th centuries in Bologna, which rivalled Florence and Rome as the center of painting in Italy. Its most important representatives include the Carracci family, including Ludovico Carracci and his two cousins, the brothers Agostino and Annibale Carracci. Later, it included other Baroque painters: Domenichino and Lanfranco, active mostly in Rome, eventually Guercino and Guido Reni, and Accademia degli Incamminati in Bologna, which was run by Lodovico Carracci. Certain artistic conventions, which over time became traditionalist, had been developed in Rome during the first decades of the 16th century. As time passed, some artists sought new approaches to their work that no longer reflected only the Roman manner. The Carracci studio sought innovation or invention, seeking new ways to break away from traditional modes of painting while continuing to look for inspiration from their literary contemporaries; the studio formulated a style that was distinguished from the recognized manners of art in their time. This style was seen as both systematic and imitative, borrowing particular motifs from the past Roman schools of art and innovating a modernistic approach.

Nicola da Urbino (ca. 1480 – 1540/1547) formerly confused with Nicola Pellipario has traditionally been designated as the Italian ceramicist from Castel Durante in Marche who introduced into painted maiolica the new istoriato style, in which the whole surface of a plate or charger is devoted to a single representational scene. Nicola's scenes were often derived by freely adapting woodcuts from Romances or the Latin classics, such as the illustrated Ovid's Metamorphoses printed at Venice, 1497, to which he returned so often that it appears that a copy of it must have lain in his shop; however, he did not merely copy: "the often crude outlines of the black-and-white figures are converted by him into embodiments of supple vitality," Bernard Rackham observed. Later he gave up book illustrations in favour of compositions of Raphael, mediated through the engravings of Marcantonio Raimondi, and, in at least one case, by direct access to a drawing by Raphael of Michelangelo's David, seen from the rear. Nicola often introduced prominently pieces of schematic and severely frontal architecture in the Renaissance manner. His plate of Solomon Adoring an Idol in the Museo Correr adapts an illustration from Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii.