Ugo da Carpi painter and printmaker, the first Italian

Italian people

The Italian people are an ethnic group that share a common Italian culture, ancestry and speak the Italian language as a mother tongue. Within Italy, Italians are defined by citizenship, regardless of ancestry or country of residence , and are distinguished from people...

 practitioner of the art of the chiaroscuro woodcut, a technique involving the use of several wood blocks to make one print, each block cut to produce a different tone of the same colour. In 1516 he requested from the Venetian senate a patent for his method "of making from woodcuts prints that seem as though painted". Most of his prints depict works by Raphael

Raphael

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...

 and Parmigianino

Parmigianino

Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola , also known as Francesco Mazzola or more commonly as Parmigianino or sometimes "Parmigiano", was an Italian Mannerist painter and printmaker active in Florence, Rome, Bologna, and his native city of Parma...

, including one entitled "Hercules Chasing Avarice from the Temple of the Muses."

His best known engravings include "A Sybil", "Descent from the Cross", and "History of Simon the Sorcerer".