What's so great about Italian Baroque painting? Last year's Genius of Rome show at the Royal Academy failed to convince anyone that the run of Baroque splatterers were as interesting as the divine Caravaggio; while connoisseurs simpered over the Carracci, others saw the obvious fact that Caravaggio's naturalism makes all those wavy draperies look as interesting as next door's curtains.
Baroque painting was part of an architectural ensemble, an emotive religious or state theatre, rather than something to study on the walls of a gallery. One of the few things in this show that breaks out of the general tedium is a portrait in a spectacular gilded frame by Filippo Parodi. The sculptural energy of Parodi's frame, which among swirling golden forms has gods and goddesses witnessing the Judgment of Paris, jokingly breaks the boundary between painting and the real world by having Paris point from the frame to the woman in the portrait. The painting itself is mediocre. That says it all.
The highlight of this exhibition is Rubens's Equestrian Portrait of Giovan Carlo Doria - the horse seems about to leap out of the painting, its tail shining in a starburst of heavenly light. Rubens is dynamic and flowing yet precise; most of the painters here are so hopelessly lost in trying to look opulent that they never say anything precise at all. Fans of the Italian Baroque admire its use of colour but it is totally without the subtlety of 16th-century Venetian colourists such as Tintoretto. Except for an Orazio Gentileschi - whose refreshingly crisp Annunciation is the final peak here - the revolutionary achievement of Caravaggio was taken up not in Italy, but in Spain and the Netherlands.
The Italian Baroque painters in this exhibition were second rate. Look at Assereto's Saint Francis in Ecstasy with the Musician Angel in this exhibition then at Zurbaran's Saint Francis in Meditation in the National Gallery's Spanish room. The startling reality of Zurbaran makes the Italian painting pretentious and sterile. There is no vital spark to the majority of these paintings.
· Until June 16. Details: 020-7747 2885.
