Antonio Tempesta

By the 1590s Rome had become the place a young artist went to be seen, and Antonio Tempesta, a Florentine who had trained under Santi di Tito and then the Flemish painter Joannes Stradanus, went there to make his name. He had already worked on Giorgio Vasari's team decorating the Palazzo Vecchio back in Florence, but it was in Rome, from 1580 until his death, that he found his real subject.

He painted frescoes in grand houses, yet what carried his name across Europe was the etching needle. Tempesta turned out more than 1,400 prints and dominated the Roman print trade for a generation. He made cavalry battles, hunts, processions, biblical cycles, and a set of 150 scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses that other artists mined for compositions for a century afterward. The taste for crowded, galloping battle scenes he had absorbed from Stradanus, a hunting and military specialist.

Because prints were cheap and portable, his galloping horses and packed skirmishes reached workshops in Antwerp and far past it, feeding designs onto tapestries, majolica pottery, and painted furniture. He died in Rome in 1630, at about 75, still cutting plates.