Giambettino Cignaroli

In January 1770 a 13-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart stopped in Verona on his first Italian tour, and someone had his portrait painted at the keyboard. The commission went to, or at least through, the most respected painter in the city, Giambettino Cignaroli. Cignaroli would be dead by December of that same year, so the boy composer's likeness came near the end of a long, settled career.

Cignaroli was Verona's painter. Born there in 1706 and trained under the local master Antonio Balestra, he filled the churches of the Veneto with calm, correct altarpieces in a late Baroque manner already cooling toward Neoclassicism. In 1764 he took charge of the city's academy of painting, and he cared about it enough to leave property in his will to keep a free public art school running in Verona under his family name.

That school still carries it: the Accademia Cignaroli.