Domenico Piola was the most eminent of a family of artists who dominated Genoese painting for fifty years around 1700. He produced many designs for book illustrations and other engravings, including this finished model for the frontispiece to an academic thesis. It depicts a woman offering her academic thesis to a personification of Liguria, with the figure of Fame blowing a trumpet, the arms of Genoa above, and a view of the city’s harbour with its famous lighthouse in the distance. No. 152