Giovanni Trevisan was born in Angarano (Bassano del Grappa) on May 20, 1735. In 1762 he moved to Venice in the studio of the engraver Francesco Bartolozzi, where he perfected the art of engraving and came into contact with the main Bassano craftsmen, the Remondini, and with the famous Bodoni, with whom he worked in 1769 on the celebratory volume for the wedding of Duke Ferdinando of Parma. Now consolidated his fame, in 1771 Giovanni Volpato takes the surname of his grandmother and decides to move to Rome where, in the following thirty years, he will join the activity of engraver (his are the reproductions of the Vatican Lodges in 1772-1776), that an antiquarian and antiquities broker, personally financing a whole series of excavations, from the Baths of Caracalla in 1779, to the Baths of Tito, in collaboration with Gavin Hamilton, to Piazza San Marco and Piazza Venezia, just to name a few.

Giovanni Volpato establishes relationships with the most influential salons in the city: the names are those of Angelica Kauffmann, her husband Antonio Zucchi, Thomas Jenkins and the Venetian ambassador to Rome Girolamo Zulian, a great collector and connoisseur of art. It was the latter who commissioned the Theseus and the Minotaur from Antonio Canova in 1781, the only Canova marble of which a version in bisque by Volpato is known.

A skilled businessman, Giovanni Volpato, in addition to developing the trade of antiques, the restoration and production of copies and engravings, linked to collectors and foreign visitors, also dedicates himself to the creation of reproductions of the masterpieces of classical antiquity, modeled in small dimensions, in the elegant and candid biscuit (unglazed porcelain).