Throughout most of the seventeenth century, numerous artists working in Italy and in particular in Rome produced small-format, cabinet paintings, often on copper panels. These were delicately executed compositions that readily found buyers on the art market of the day. They allowed painters considerable freedom for trying out new compositions or consolidating ideas and inventions derived from a variety of sources. Artists such as Guido Reni, Domenichino, the Carracci brothers, Agostino and Annibale, Carlo Saraceni and other painters working in Rome (many of them landscape painters of northern European origin) executed such works, but they were not to be found in Spanish art.