Unknown Artist; Capitoline Antonious; 1600-1800; pen and ink; wash on paper; 9 1/8 in. x 13 3/8 in. (23.1 cm. x 33.9 cm.); Italian artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries studied ancient statuary with renewed interest and invigorated the practice as part of academic education. For centuries; artists had learned about human anatomy by drawing plaster casts of the sculptures of antiquity. To the generation of Antonio Canova (1757--1822); Felice Giani (1758--1823); and their protege Giuseppe Bossi (1777--1815); the art ?of classical antiquity provided guidance for the renewal of art necessitated by the era's political transformations. As director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan; in 1801 the capital of a French satellite republic; Bossi used an audience with the first consul Napoleon Bonaparte to request additional plaster casts for his institution. Back in Milan; he urged his students to emulate 'the beautiful style of the Greek' and its long tradition on the Italian peninsula to counter French political dominance with Italian cultural superiority. This drawing of a Polykleitian figure might indicate that Bossi's contemporaries heeded his advice.