Italian family of gem-engravers. Tommaso Saulini (b Rome, 1793; d Rome, 24 June 1864) and his son Luigi Saulini (b Rome, 1819; d Rome, 1893) had a cameo-carving workshop in Rome that they maintained successively from c. 1830 to 1883. Their activities were divided between the production of carved portraits and ambitious compositions based on Classical sculptures, ancient gems or contemporary Neo-classical subjects taken from the work of such leading contemporary artists as Bertel Thorvaldsen (with whom Tommaso had trained) and John Gibson (i). Examples of the second category cut by Tommaso are a large, oval sardonyx cameo (Copenhagen, Thorvaldsens Mus.) based on Thorvaldsen’s Cupid and Ganymede Playing at Dice (marble, 1831) and an onyx cameo (1844–54) based on Gibson’s Cupid and Psyche (1844; ex-Met., New York) that was later copied in shell for the International Exhibition of 1862 in London. Two comparable cameos with figure compositions by Luigi are the Toilet of Nausica (New York, Met.), which forms the centrepiece of the gold diadem from a set of jewellery in the Neo-classical style designed by Gibson, and Angels Bearing the Body of St Catherine to Mount Sinai (New York, Met.). For this Luigi departed from the Neo-classical sources from which both he and his father took their inspiration. The subject is from a painting by the German artist Karl Anton Heinrich Mucke (1806–92).