Giacomo Franco (1556-1620) was born and grew in Venice, where he used to work. He was the son of painter Giovanni-Battista Franco (1510-1561), with whom he began his artistic training at the age of eleven. He worked as a painter, engraver, woodcutter, and dealer in graphics and books.
For a while he studied in Bologna with Agostino Carracci (1557-1602) who, with his brother Annibale (1560-1609) and his cousin Lodovico (1555-1619), were prominent figures at the end of the sixteenth century in the movement against artificial mannerism in Italian painting.
In the early 1580s they opened a private teaching academy that soon became a center for progressive art. In their teaching they laid special emphasis on drawing from life, and clear draughtsmanship became a quality particularly associated with their school. Possibly as a result of his study with Agostino Carracci, Franco published a collection of his own “facsimile font” figure studies in 1596, in which one or two human figures are positioned to form each of the letters of the alphabet.
In 1595 he took over his father’s workshop and eventually became a well-known publisher. Although he was not documented as belonging to the booksellers’ or printers’ guilds, he is recorded in 1606 and again in 1619 as belonging to the painters’ guild. Franco’s determination to be recognized as an artist is reflected in his will, in which he refers to himself as a “designer.”