The Bolognese artist Amico Aspertini was active not only as a painter of panels, frescoes and miniatures, but also as a sculptor, draughtsman and engraver. Born into a painting family, he probably received his training first in his father's workshop, and subsequently in the atelier of Francesco Francia. In 1505/06 he was part of the Bologna workshop association that Francia ran with Lorenzo Costa. In 1529 he was involved in the creation of festival decorations on the occasion of the meeting between Charles V and Pope Clement VII, and from 1529 (at the latest) until 1546 he served as "Massato delle quattro arti". In Bologna, Aspertini worked for the city's leading families, and in 1504 Anton Galeazzo Bentivoglio was named as godfather to his first son. Also, like Marcantonio Raimondi and Ripanda, he was closely associated with the humanist circle in the university city of Bologna. Numerous commissions in Bologna and its environs attest to his artistic success. Several travels and commissions elsewhere are documented: to Rome from 1496 to presumably 1503, possibly in 1526/27, and again in 1531/32 and 1534, to Lucca in 1507/08, and to Minerbio in 1535/40. In the early sources Aspertini is described as "bizarre", thanks to his abrupt and headstrong nature. His art is marked by a tendency towards eclecticism; his early works exhibit a combination of the most varied stylistic elements, and even later he made use of very different models, whether northern Italian, Roman, or from north of the Alps, in constantly new adaptations. His rich store of drawings, which served him again and again as a source of motifs for his own creations, documents his interest in antiquity as well as contemporary art.
