Bartolomeo Pinelli

An extremely prolific engraver, his illustrations depicted the costumes of the Italian people, the great epic poems and numerous other subjects, including popular customs.

He held in high regard the traditions and religions of ancient Greece and Rome, and completed a series of engravings of the pantheon of classical gods.

This particular work illustrates the attention Pinelli lavished on popular tales, and the idealized admiration that had developed among some of the educated and aristocratic class for brigand culture.

Pinelli suggested that brigands, or banditi, in their quest for independence from the laws imposed by absolute rulers retained an inheritance of the desire for liberty of ancient Republican Rome.

Oreste Raggi, writing in 1835, the same year that the artist died, cites many of Pinelli's designs and watercolors, and around forty collections of engravings published in Rome under ten different editors.