Pietro Antonio Novelli

Eighteenth-century Venice was one of Europe's great printing towns, and Pietro Antonio Novelli became the artist its publishers reached for. Trained in the studio of Giambattista Pittoni, a leading Venetian decorator, he painted altarpieces and frescoes across northern Italy, but his lasting mark is on paper. In 1760 he designed the illustrations for a grand edition of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, the 16th-century epic of the First Crusade, and soon after the plates for the collected comedies of Carlo Goldoni, the playwright then reinventing Italian theatre.

His reputation carried well beyond the lagoon. Catherine the Great, empress of Russia, was among the patrons who commissioned from him, and around 1779 he moved to Rome, where he stayed for more than 20 years before returning home to Venice.

He died there in 1804, at the end of the Republic's long life as an independent state. His own account of that career, written in his last years, was published 30 years after his death, in 1834.