Paolo Mercuri
Italian engraver (1804–1884)
Paolo Baldassarre Mercuri (20 December 1804, in Rome – 30 April 1884, in Bucharest) was an Italian engraver and illustrator.
Biography
He was born to Vincenzo Mercuri, a farmer, and his wife Barbara née Battaglia. A few years after his birth, during the French occupation of the Papal States, they were forced to sell their farm and move to Marino, where they rented a vineyard and lived in the vacated Augustinian Convent. He first displayed his artistic talent by sketching some of the ancient artworks the friars had left behind.
In 1816, he entered a boarding school at the San Michele a Ripa hospice. There, he studied engraving with Antonio Ricciani. He was also able to attend drawing classes taught by Tommaso Minardi at the Accademia di San Luca. During this time, he became familiar with the works of Michelangelo and Raphael at the Vatican. In 1820, he was nominated for a merit award. He completed his studies in 1825.
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This entry incorporates text from “Paolo Mercuri” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.