Cooper Hewitt says...
Italian painter, printmaker and draughtsman. After training in Florence in the Neo-classical tradition, he won a scholarship and settled in Rome between 1789 and 1794. His patron Tommaso Puccini was an intellectual and connoisseur who later became Director of the Gallerie Fiorentine... Sabatelli borrowed explicitly from Classical works, as can be seen in his reconstruction of the furnishings, clothing and hairstyles of the Roman period, and in his use of a type of drawing practised by the followers of David.
After a stay in Venice, he returned to Florence in 1795 and between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, Sabatelli worked on a group of etchings of the Via Crucis that became the most widely circulated series in Tuscany. For inspiration he turned to literature that displayed a taste for the ‘terrible’ and the Sublime, dwelling particularly on such characters from Dante as Farinata, Paolo and Francesca, and Count Ugolino, and on scenes from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. In order to expand his repertory, he also drew on such northern European writers as Shakespeare and Milton, whose works were becoming increasingly popular. In 1808 Sabatelli moved to Milan to become a professor of painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera.
Father to Giuseppe (1813–1843) and Francesco Sabatelli (1801–1829), who were painters and professors of art in Florence; both died young.
https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T074823
