Battista Franco Veneziano

A young Venetian arrived in Rome in the 1530s and did what many ambitious artists did there, drawing endlessly after the ancient statues. Then he saw Michelangelo's work, and it more or less took over his life. Battista Franco, nicknamed il Semolei, copied the master again and again, and for the rest of his career his figures carried that borrowed muscular grandeur.

He moved around a great deal. He painted an allegory of the Battle of Montemurlo, a Medici victory of 1537, now in the Pitti Palace in Florence, frescoed a chapel in Rome, spent years in Urbino, and finally returned home to Venice, where he worked on the ceiling of Sansovino's grand library on Saint Mark's Square and decorated a chapel in San Francesco della Vigna.

Critics then and since have tended to agree on one thing: his paintings can feel stiff, weighed down by all that Michelangelo, while his drawings and etchings move with real freedom. His etchings circulated widely, and through them his Roman figure-drawing reached artists who never saw the frescoes.