Piazzeta, Giovanni Battista

Venetian painter and graphic artist, he began his apprenticeship in the workshop of his father, a prominent carver. Within his production, a series of canvases representing genre scenes, all considered masterpieces, occupies a relevant place: The Fortune Teller, in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Venice; Pastoral scene, at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Idyll on the beach, at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. In his role as an illustrator, we must highlight the drawings made for Tasso's Liberated Jerusalem, a work published in 1745 by one of his protectors, Giovanni Battista Albrizzi. His compositions, along with the renewal he made in the themes of genre painting, would be imitated after his death, his models reaching almost until the beginning of the following century.

Joseph Wagner (1706 – 1780) was a highly regarded 18th century engraver and draftsman.

He was born in Thalendorf in Gestratz, on Lake Constance, in 1706. He studied painting in Venice under Jacopo Amigoni, who convinced him to convert to engraving, and Wagner accompanied Amigoni to Rome and Bologna, and in 1733 to England. He later moved to Paris, to study engraving under Laurent Cars. He then made a second stay in England, where his first productions were portraits of the three princesses, Anne, Amelia, and Caroline, the daughters of George II. He engraved several other plates in England, but returned to Venice, where he opened a school and also carried on a considerable business as a print salesman. He died in Munich in 1780.