Born in Mantua in ca. 1559, Andrea Andreani was the most accomplished practitioner of chiaroscuro technique in late sixteenth-century Italy. Little is known about his initial training. He began as a blockcutter. Around 1583, he started to copy early line woodcuts into new chiaroscuro versions. He also reproduced intarsia pavements, sculptures, and bronze reliefs with the same method. Andreani was active in Rome (ca. 1580), Florence (1583-86), and Siena (1586-1593), before returning permanently to his native city and setting up a workshop. He died in Manuta in 1629. Andreani's oeuvre includes large prints comprising several sheets, such as his copy of Triumph of Christ after Titian, and copies of drawings based on Mantegna's cartoons for the Triumph of Caesar. Between 1602 and 1610, Andreani reprinted and recut earlier chiaroscuro woodblocks by Ugo da Carpi, Antonio da Trento and Niccolò Vicentino, bringing them to new levels of technical and visual refinement.

Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, better known as Parmigianino (1503-1540), was an Italian Mannerist painter, draftsman, and printmaker. In Parma and upon his arrival in Rome in 1524, he experimented with print to study works by artists he admired, such as Raphael. He fled Rome at the time of its sack in 1527, and he moved to Bologna. There, he began his engagement with chiaroscuro woodcuts, collaborating with Ugo da Carpi and Antonio da Trento. Parmigianino then returned to Parma in 1530.