Pietro Testa e la Nemica Fortuna. Un Artista Filosofo (1612-1650) tra Lucca e Roma.

Among the most renowned Italian printmakers and draftsmen of the 1600s, Pietro Testa desired fame as a history painter but never achieved it. In Rome by the late 1620s, Testa drew hundreds of antiquities for engravings and for various patrons. In 1631 he entered Pietro da Cortona's studio, but Cortona threw him out because of his difficult personality. After an interlude in Lucca, Testa returned to Rome vowing to study coloring. In fact, he continued to concentrate on drawing and etching, where his greater skills lay. Another stay in Lucca six years later failed to attract new patrons.
Back in Rome, Testa began a treatise on painting, rejecting Baroque illusionism and the concept of copying nature like those "dirty and ridiculous apes of nature," the Dutch Italianates. He also transformed his imagery, replacing poetic mythologies with ancient history themes and employing a more severe, monumental style anticipating Neoclassicism.