Placido Fabris

By the time he was 15, Placido Fabris was already taking prizes at the Venetian Academy for copies so exact the judges could barely fault them, and copying stayed his specialty for life. He had come down to the city from the mountains of the Alpago, near Belluno, where he was born in 1802.

He worked in the years when Antonio Canova's cool, classical taste still shaped Venice, and he built his living on portraits. In Trieste, then a booming Adriatic port under Austrian rule, he became a favourite of the wealthy merchant families, who wanted their faces set down with the same precision he had once given to plaster casts.

Alongside the portraits he restored old pictures and painted miniatures, small likenesses meant to be held in the hand. He died in Venice in 1859, and the first full study of his work appeared only in 2004.