Raphael begins work on the frescoes in the pope's apartment in the Vatican, known as the Stanze ('Rooms')

Giorgione and Titian introduce the richness of colour which characterizes the high Renaissance style in Venice

The startling colour contrasts in Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling anticipate one of the main characteristics of Italian mannerism

The painter Giorgione dies after a short but extremely influential life in Venice

Leonardo da Vinci moves to France, on the invitation of Francis I

The German painter Hans Holbein the Younger establishes his own studio in Basel

Mannerism develops in Italy in the work of the painters Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino

Lucas Cranach's studio in Wittenberg has a profitable line in naked female figures from mythology

Hans Holbein the Younger pays his first visit to England, and stays with Thomas More in Chelsea

The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, makes Titian his court painter (an arrangement continued by Philip II)

Pieter Brueghel the Elder depicts biblical events taking place among the peasants of the Netherlands countryside

Domenikos Theotokopoulos moves to Spain, where he becomes known as El Greco

The English artist John White paints the everyday life of the Secotan Indians of America

Nicholas Hilliard paints the delightful miniature known simply as Young Man among Roses

Annibale Carracci completes an influential ceiling fresco in the Farnese palace in Rome

The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens completes an altarpiece in Rome which is an early masterpiece of the baroque

Rubens returns from Italy to Antwerp, where he soon establishes Europe's most successful and prolific studio

The Mughal school of painting reaches a peak of perfection in the reign of Jahangir

The 19-year-old Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck is employed by Rubens in Antwerp as his chief assistant

The Dutch painter Frans Hals displays exceptional brilliance in his group portraits, including several of the civic guards of Haarlem

The Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck begins a five-year stay, and a successful career as a portrait painter, in Genoa

Diego Velazquez becomes court painter to the king of Spain - a post which he will hold for the remaining thirty-seven years of his life

Nicolas Poussin arrives in Rome, where he develops the tradition of French classicism

Rubens completes a great narrative sequence of twenty-one paintings to celebrate the achievements of Marie de Médicis

Claude Lorrain, basing himself like Poussin in Rome, paints classical landscapes suffused in light