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Heads of Two Men from the School of Athens, Engraving, 1785

Köpfe zweier Männer aus der 'Schule von Athen

Domenico Cunego

Cunego was born at Verona. Having studied under the otherwise-unknown painter Francesco Ferrari, he began his artistic career as a painter, producing several works, all of which are now lost or untraceable. At age 18, however, he switched to engraving (a field in which he was possibly self-taught). He died in Rome.

The engravings he made depicting Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, published in Gavin Hamilton's Schola Italica Picturae (1773), were an important source for the artists of his time.[1] He is notable not only for reproducing paintings by his famous fellow-countrymen like Guido Reni and Italian contemporaries such as Antonio Balestra, Francesco Solimena, and Felice Boscaratti, but also works by British artists in Italy catering to Grand Tourists.

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Man Tricked by Gypsies, Pen and Ink on Paper

Leonardo da Vinci

Gypsies had arrived in western Europe around 1420, claiming to be penitent pilgrims from Egypt but soon acquiring a reputation for fortune-telling and theft. Leonardo’s drawing dates from a period of particular hostility to Gypsies in Milan, and they were banished from the Duchy of Lombardy in April 1493, the first such edict in Italy. The drawing was therefore a satire on current affairs, probably made for the entertainment of the Sforza court. It seems to have left Leonardo’s hands and became one of his best-known compositions, serving as the basis for paintings by Giorgione and (possibly) Albrecht Dürer in Venice and Quentin Massys in Antwerp. By the 1580s it was in circulation in Milan and was presumably acquired then by Pompeo Leoni, separately from Melzi’s inheritance. The young Caravaggio was serving his apprenticeship in the city at that time and may have known the drawing, and indeed this was to become a common subject in Caravaggesque painting across Europe in the seventeenth century.

From an entry on the Royal Collection Trust:

https://www.rct.uk/collection/912495/a-man-tricked-by-gypsies

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Figure Drawings, Charcoal on Paper

Charles Miano

Leonardo said, “Constancy does not begin but is that which perseveres.”

From an article in Realism Today: