Nicola Pio, born around 1677 and dead after 1733, was a collector and connoisseur based in Rome. In 1724, he finished a manuscript containing biographies of 225 artists, most of them his contemporaries but also artists of the preceding centuries. The manuscript was not printed during Pio’s lifetime. It was published for the first time in 1977. Each biography was accompanied by a drawn portrait. The images of contemporary artists were almost all self-portraits, while Nicola Pio commissioned portraits of Renaissance and Baroque artists based on older sources. The portraits are drawn in different techniques, often in black or red chalk, sometimes on tinted paper. Many have a decorative framework with symbols referring to art. It is likely that Pio intended the portraits to be engraved and that they should illustrate the biographies in a printed book. This never happened. Instead, the portraits were included in the drawings collections of other 18th-century connoisseurs, including that of the Swedish aristocrat Carl Gustaf Tessin. 149 of the portraits belong to the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, while around ten have survived in other collections.

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