Giovanni Battista Coriolano

Portrait of Ioannis Kottounios by Giovanni Battista Coriolano

Giovanni Battista Coriolano (1590–1649) was an Italian engraver of the Baroque period.

He was almost certainly the son of the German transplant to Italy, the engraver Cristoforo Coriolano. Giovanni Battista was born and died in Bologna. He studied painting under Giovanni Luigi Valesio, but found little work painting in churches at Bologna. He painted a St. Nicholas and a St. Bruno for the church of Santa Anna; and an altarpiece of Saints John, James, & Bernard for the Nunziata.

He was more successful as an engraver, the main familial profession, he worked both on wood and on copper. Those in chiaroscuro are dated from 1619 to 1625. In style they recall Francesco Villamena, include:

• Portrait of Vincenzo Sgualdi.
• Fortunius Licetus.
• Joannes Cottunius.
• Image of the Virgin.
• Miraculous Image of Virgin painted by St. Luke, held by 3 angels & Cupid sleeping after Reni.
• Virgin and Child, & St. John after Alessandro Tiarini.
• Christ crowned with thorns; etched in imitation of a woodcut after Lodovico Carracci.
• Twenty-seven plates for the Emblemata moralia aere incisa et versibus italicis explicata (1628) of Paolo Maccio; the entire work consists of eighty-three plates on iconography; the remaining 56 being by O. Gatti and A. Parasina.
• Triumphal Arch in honor of Louis XIII.

He also engraved a number of theses and frontispieces.

References

• Bryan, Michael (1886). Robert Edmund Graves, ed. Dictionary of Painters and Engravers, Biographical and Critical (Volume I: A-K). York St. #4, Covent Garden, London; Original from Fogg Library, Digitized May 18, 2007: George Bell and Sons. p. 308.