Ercole Setti

Ercole Setti (1530-1618) 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. Working in the late Mannerist tradition, he produced religious and historical compositions for local churches and patrons, but he is best remembered today for his accomplished work as a draftsman. His drawings show a confident, fluid command of line and a particular interest in the everyday social subjects of late Renaissance Italy, including market vendors, small tradesmen, street performers, and the many characters who populated the public squares of Italian cities of his day.

Setti's most celebrated body of work is a series of finely observed market scenes and small trades, originally bound together as an album that was preserved for many years in a private collection in Turin. This important sheet album was discussed in detail by F. Zava Boccazzi in her 1968 article "An Unpublished Album of Drawings by Ercole Setti," published in Master Drawings, which brought the series to broader scholarly attention. Each sheet in the album carries a title at the top 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 can now be found in important collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which holds the sheet titled Vendor of Horoscopes. Individual sheets from the album have made their way into other significant public and private collections as the album has been dispersed over the years, and each new appearance of a sheet from the series adds another glimpse of Setti's remarkable social documentation of his era.

As a printmaker, Setti also produced engravings, and his graphic work has been studied alongside that of other Emilian draftsmen of the period. He remains a relatively specialist figure within 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.