François Perrier

In 1638 a book of etchings appeared in Paris under a long Latin title promising the noble statues of Rome that had escaped the envious tooth of time. It held 100 plates, one ancient sculpture after another, drawn in the city's collections by François Perrier, a painter from the Franche-Comté known in his day as le Bourguignon, the Burgundian. Among them are the Spinario, the bronze boy pulling a thorn from his foot, and the reclining river god called Marforio, both still on the Capitoline Hill. A second volume followed in 1645, with 55 plates of ancient reliefs.

He made those plates during his second long stay in Rome, from 1635 to 1645. Years earlier he had worked there under Giovanni Lanfranco, the painter of the great dome of Sant'Andrea della Valle, and in Paris around 1632 he took on a teenage pupil, Charles Le Brun, later first painter to Louis XIV. Back in Paris for good, Perrier painted the gallery ceiling of the Hôtel de La Vrillière, the mansion that now houses the Banque de France, and in 1648 he was one of the founders of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.