BARTOLOZZI Francesco

(Florence 1728 – Lisbon 1815)

Italian engraver, son of Maddalena Pieri and Gaetano Florentine goldsmith who probably had a workshop in Ponte Vecchio. At the age of nine years Francesco had already learnt to draw and the technical bases of the intaglio. He improved his studies at the Academy of Florence with the master painter and draftsman Ignazio Hugford from Pisa, preferring the engraving work. After the apprenticeship he moved to Venice for six years (1748-1754) where he worked at the prestigious intaglio workshop of Joseph Wagner, one of the most important in Europe.

During this time he met the most prestigious Venetian engravers of that time and he perfected the combined use of etching and engraving. Many of his prints engraved in Venice show: “F. Bartolozzi incid. appo J. Wagner. ”

His strength and his personality had established themselves to the point that the same teacher encouraged him to set up a shop on his own, and when the young man married Lucia Ferri, daughter of the Venetian doctor Francesco Domenico, Wagner himself was his wedding best man.

Francesco was committed above all to translate in printing several landscapes by Marco Ricci and Francesco Zuccarelli and his works, very well appreciated in Milan and Florence, were sought after by merchants to add prints to catalogs or to insert them into collections. In 1756 Bartolozzi moved to Rome to enter the Calcografia Camerale, a polygraph laboratory established by Pope Clemenete XII. At the invitation of Richard Dalton, real librarian, in 1764 he went to London, where he helped to spread the knowledge of the great Italian masters of the Renaissance with his work.
Appointed court engraver, he printed reproductions of paintings of royal collections; particularly celebrated were his engravings by Guercino’s drawings preserved at Windsor Castle.

Due to family and financial mishaps, he left England and had moved to Lisbon, where he was appointed director of the National Academy and where he remained for the rest of his life.

The vast work of Bartolozzi (more than 2500 prints) is essentially constituted of engravings made with high technical skill that has made use of the ‘dotted’, procedure he invented in Venice and widespread after him especially in England.
He was buried in Lisbon in the Santa Isabel church.