Francesco Monti

In the 1720s Owen McSwiny, an Irish theatre impresario living in Italy, had an unusual idea for British buyers, a series of large paintings of imaginary tombs honouring recent British statesmen and soldiers. Each canvas was divided among specialists, with architecture, landscape and figures by different hands, and the team included Canaletto, Sebastiano and Marco Ricci and Giambattista Pittoni. Francesco Monti of Bologna painted five of them, among them the tombs of the statesman James Stanhope and the general William Cadogan.

Monti trained first in Modena and then, from 1703, in the Bologna workshop of Giovan Gioseffo dal Sole. Around 1720 he entered the Accademia Clementina, the city's academy of art, and in 1725 he was elected its head while away in Venice. The Belvedere's Cicero, seated on the ground with his first speech against Catiline in his hand, dates from about 1720, and the museum's record names the Bolognese painter Giacomo Antonio Boni alongside him.

His career then moved north. Between 1737 and 1743 he frescoed the church of Santa Maria della Pace in Brescia for the Oratorian fathers, and the success brought so many commissions that he settled in the city. Through the 1740s and 1750s he decorated churches across Lombardy with Giovanni Zanardi, a specialist in painted architecture. He died in Brescia in 1768.