Ottavio Leoni: The Rediscovered Roman Portraitist Ottavio Leoni (1578 – 4 September 1630) was an Italian painter and printmaker of the early Baroque, active primarily in Rome. He remains largely unrecognized by art historians today—a testament to his obscurity during his lifetime and a frustrating challenge for scholars attempting to reconstruct his artistic legacy. Despite being almost entirely forgotten, Leoni’s work possesses remarkable elegance and technical skill, particularly evident in his portraits and his groundbreaking engraving of Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio's masterpiece. This…