Cinema has lost another giant. Officials in Rome today announced the death of Michelangelo Antonioni, one of Italy's greatest film directors, at the age of 94.

Antonioni, who continued to direct and paint despite a stroke in 1985 that rendered him frail and speechless, died last night in Rome, on the same day that Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish director, passed away on Faro, a small Baltic island.

“He was an acute observer of the malaise of the 1900s, in all its expressions,” said Francesco Rutelli, Italy’s Culture Minister, of Antonioni, whose beautiful, slow-moving films, including his masterpiece L'Avventura, depicted what he saw as the emotional desolation of modern, capitalist society.

“With Antonioni dies not only one of the greatest directors but also a master of modernity,” said Walter Veltroni, the Mayor of Rome, where Antonioni's body will lie in state at the city hall, the Campidoglio, tomorrow morning.

After studying economics at the University of Bologna in the 1930s, Antonioni worked briefly as a film critic before making a series of shorts and documentary films about the struggles of Italy's working poor. But it was his move into the empty, fraught lives of the rich that brought him international fame and stardom, when L'Avventura, frequently named as one of the greatest films ever made, was shown at Cannes in 1960.

The film, which tells of the disappearance of a beautiful girl during a holiday of rich Italians in Sicily, became his signature work: its aching long takes, silences and the sense of harmony between his characters and the landscape in which their anguish unfolds delighted the critics, even if audiences found it harder to bear. The innovative beauty of L'Avventura, which infused Antonioni's following two films, La Notte (The Night) in 1961, L’Eclisse (Eclipse) in 1962, assured his entry into the pantheon of cinema's great stylists even as it also prompted the American critic, Richard Sarris, to coin the unflattering term "Antoni-ennui."

The success of his Italian work launched Antonioni into foreign films and the big budgets of Hollywood. His legacy to Britain was Blow-Up, his 1966 study of swinging London that starred Vanessa Redgrave and the model Veruschka in the story of a fashion photographer, based on David Bailey, who accidentally photographs a murder. It was the only film for which he was nominated for an Oscar.

In the 1970s, Antonioni worked for MGM, making Zabriskie Point, a film about a couple who steal an aeroplane and fly to California's Death Valley. The film received mixed reviews but its use music from Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead and acknowledgement of the power of the counter-culture movement and student radicalism won it a devoted audience.

In 1995 Antonioni was given an Oscar for his life's work. “In the empty, silent spaces of the world, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places our hearts, and found in them, too, a strange and terrible beauty: austere, elegant, enigmatic, haunting," read the tribute, which was made by Jack Nicholson, the star of Antonioni's 1975 work, The Passenger, another grand but poorly-received study of a man's search for meaning in a cold, technologically advanced world.

Using a notepad to communicate and his wife, Enrica Fico, as his interpreter, Antonioni, a tall thin man, defied the effects of his stroke to continue working, making Beyond the Clouds, based on a collection of his short stories in 1994, and even a segment of Eros, a patchwork of shorts about couple's breaking up, in 2004. He had no children.

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