The Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni, whose 1966 classic Blowup defined London in the “swinging 60s”, has died aged 94.

He died peacefully at his home in Rome on Monday night, a few hours after the death of that other great figure of European art-house cinema, Ingmar Bergman , who was 89.

Antonioni’s career spanned six decades and, as well as the Oscar-nominated Blowup, included L’Avventura and The Passenger.

The Mayor of Rome said that the director’s body would lie in state at City Hall this morning.

Antonioni’s slow-moving, oblique films were not always crowd-pleasers, but works such as L’Avventura turned him into an icon for directors such as Martin Scorsese, who has described him as a poet with a camera.

His British breakthrough came with Blowup, which starred David Hemmings as a fashion photographer who becomes immersed in a murder mystery. The film challenged taboos with its liberal attitude toward nudity and sexuality.

Antonioni’s freewheeling approach did not make life easy for his actors. Sarah Miles, who starred in Blowup, told The Times: “He was a terrific director and the film was his unique vision of the 60s. But we were puppets for the director to play with. When you are lying naked with a man on top of you, you want to know, ‘Is this my husband or my lover?’. But Antonioni just told me, ‘It does not matter’.”

Miles dared to ask the director to explain a famous scene in which a white-faced group play an invisible game of tennis with nonexistent rackets and balls. “He just whispered to me, ‘Sarah, eet is for ze critics!’.”

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, author of a book about L’Avventura, described Antonioni’s films as productions that “invite you to concentrate on them, like great music”. Nowell-Smith, who also curated a season of Antonioni’s work at BFI Southbank, London, two years ago, added: “It’s extraordinary that he should die within a day of Bergman. It’s the last link with the great days of European art cinema.”

Walter Veltroni, the Mayor of Rome, said: “Thanks to Antonioni’s cinema we had another view of reality, another way to look at the face of a woman, the design of a car. Even a cloud was not the same thing after having seen his films.”

Antonioni captured the counter-culture of the “flower power” era in 1970, filming Zabriskie Pointin California – his first film set in the Unites States. It starred Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, neither of whom had any previous acting experience, and the soundtrack included music by bands such as the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd.

In 1974 he cast Jack Nicholson as a journalist who assumes the identity of a dead stranger in Professione: Reporter (The Passenger).

In 1985 he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralysed, but he continued to work behind the camera. “Filming for me is living,” he said.

His last release was The Dangerous Thread of Thingsin 2004, part of a trilogy of short films released under the title Eros. He was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival in 1983 and in 1995 received a US Academy Award – presented by Jack Nicholson – for his lifetime achievements.

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• Oscars

• Cannes

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette