LEONI, Ottavio
Italian painter and printmaker. He was the son of the Paduan-born Ludovico Leoni (1542-1612), a maker of medals and wax relief portraits. Although Ottavio was active entirely in Rome, where his father had also worked and died, he was often known as ‘il Padovano’ because of the family origins. He first trained with his father.
Leoni painted altarpieces for churches in Rome such as an Annunciation for Sant’Eustachio and a Virgin and Child with St Giacinto for Santa Maria della Minerva, and a Sts Charles, Francis, and Nicholas for Sant’ Urbano. He became a member, and later president, of the Academy of St Luke. Ottavio Leoni was also the engraver of a set of portraits of painters. His portrait of Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio is the only documented portrait of the painter by another artist.
In 1603 Ottavio was involved in a libel action against Caravaggio by the painter Giovanni Baglione, whose vita provides the best source of information on Leoni’s life. One witness at the trial, Tommaso Salini, claimed he had received verses criticizing Baglione written by Orazio Gentileschi and ‘Ottavio Padovano’ (i.e. Leoni). Caravaggio testified that he knew Leoni without having ever spoken to him. Ottavio Leoni was one of the most fashionable and successful portraitist working in Rome during the first thirty years of the seventeenth century. He favoured black, red and white chalk on tinted paper, for numerous portrait drawings; his painted portraits have unfortunately not survived. In the last decade of his life he produced some forty etched or engraved portraits, and had clearly planned more that remained unrealised at his death.
