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Pietro Santi Bartoli

Italian, 1635 - 1700

Painter, engraver and etcher, b. Villa Bartola, near Perugia, 1635, worked and d. Rome 1700. Prominent in antiquarian circles. Bartoli transferred early in life to Rome, where he became a pupil of Pierre Lemaire, known as 'Le petit Lemaire' or 'Lemaire-Poussin' (c. 1612-88), and of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665). After Poussin's death collaborated frequently with Bellori, until he died in 1696, making the drawings and plates of antiquarian objects that were accompanied by Bellroi's texts.
He married a daughter of G.F.Grimaldi (the engraver Farjat, qv, married another). Although he had trained as a painter, he specialised as a draughtsman, excelling as a copyist after the Antique. In this latter capacity he joined the household of Cardinal Camillo Massimi: two volumes of drawings that he made while in this employment are preserved, one in the University Library, Glasgow, and the other in the College Library, Eton.

Bartoli is best known as an engraver of antique subjects. His several volumes of such prints, famous in their day and sometimes running into a number of different editions, include the following: 'Columna Antoniana', (?)1672; 'Colonna Traiana', 1673; 'Le pitture antiche del sepolcro de' Nasonii', 1680; 'Admiranda Romanarum antiquitatum', (?)1685; 'Le antiche lucerne sepolcrali', 1691; and 'Gli antichi sepolcri', 1697. Most were issued with texts written by the famous antiquarian and connoisseur Giovanni Pietro Bellori
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