The flow of artists from Italy increased enormously during the seventeenth century and climaxed before the second Siege of Vienna by the Turks in 1683. At that time, Italian artists were an undeniably dominant force in Austria. As the Turks approached Vienna, however, many resident Italians left the country and never returned. Their monopoly over the Austrian artistic scene was broken and was not re-established. Beginning in the eighteenth century, impulses from Paris began increasingly to subplant the influence of the italianità on Austrian culture, just as the Anglo-American global culture has come to dominate Central Europe today.

Despite their enormous importance, Austro-Italian artists have long been neglected by Austrian art historiographers. Misguided by the narrow-minded concept of the nationalism of art, researchers viewed the centuries between the German Renaissance and the advent of the generation of artists that included Fischer von Erlach, Andreas Schlütter and Johann Michael Rotmayr as a dark age, discussed only with embarrassment.