Luigi Crespi

Luigi Crespi trained as a painter and worked as a portraitist in Bologna, but he is remembered today mainly for a book. He was the son of Giuseppe Maria Crespi, one of the leading Bolognese painters of the previous generation, nicknamed lo Spagnuolo, and he grew up inside the city's busy world of art.

Crespi also took holy orders and was known around Bologna as il Canonico, the canon. In 1769 he published a third volume of the Felsina pittrice, the celebrated lives of the Bolognese painters that the scholar Carlo Cesare Malvasia had begun almost a century earlier. Crespi's addition carried the story up to his own day, gathering information on more than 200 artists and writing full biographies of dozens of them.

That book is why art historians still read him. Much of what we know about 18th-century Bolognese painters comes from a canon who painted portraits himself and set out to record the careers of everyone around him. Luigi Crespi died in Bologna in 1779.