Ercole Setti (1530-1617) was an Italian draftsman, painter, and engraver active primarily in Modena and the broader Emilia-Romagna region during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He worked in the late Mannerist tradition, producing religious and historical compositions for local churches and patrons, but he is best known today for his accomplished work as a draftsman. His drawings show a confident, fluid command of line and a particular interest in everyday social subjects, including market vendors, small tradesmen, street performers, and the cast of figures that populated the public squares of late Renaissance Italian cities.

Setti's most celebrated body of work is a series of finely observed market scenes and small trades, originally bound as an album that was housed for many years in a private collection in Turin. The album was discussed in detail by F. Zava Boccazzi in her 1968 article "An Unpublished Album of Drawings by Ercole Setti" in Master Drawings, which brought the series to wider scholarly attention. Each sheet in the series carries a title and a sequential number, and the drawings together amount to a kind of visual encyclopedia of the trades and street life of late sixteenth-century Italy. Examples from the series are now in important collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which holds the sheet titled Vendor of Horoscopes.

As a printmaker, Setti also produced engravings, and his work in this medium has been studied alongside that of other Emilian draftsmen of the period. He remains a relatively specialist figure in the broader history of Italian Renaissance art, but among scholars of master drawings he is recognized as a particularly inventive observer of contemporary life, with a graphic style that is at once economical and richly characterized. His sheets reward the kind of close looking that any fine master drawing deserves, and they offer a rare and intimate window into the everyday social fabric of late Cinquecento Italy.