Start with the free image libraries

The obvious answer, a search engine, is incomplete. Search results bury lesser-known works under pages of unrelated Italian painters, and Locatelli's name is common enough that noise is a real problem. The better starting point is Wikimedia Commons, which aggregates scans from museums and private uploads in one place. Search the artist's name, then check the category page rather than the search bar, because categories are selected and catch works a keyword search misses.

Public-domain image libraries such as Rawpixel and Openverse work the same way. Both index openly licensed material and let you filter by artist. Expect a modest haul rather than an exhaustive one. Locatelli painted in the decades either side of 1930 and his work is scattered across collections, so no free library will hold everything. What they will give you is a baseline list of titles to carry into the next step.

Work through museum and auction databases

Museum collection databases are the next layer. Many European and American institutions have digitised their holdings and made them searchable, and a work held by a museum is usually documented with a title, a date and a photograph. Search the artist's name across aggregator sites that index multiple museum collections at once, since these save you visiting each institution separately.

Auction archives fill the gap for works in private hands. Major auction houses publish past results with images, and these records often show paintings that never entered a museum. It is worth an hour. You will find works you cannot reproduce anywhere, but you will also learn the full range of his subjects, which makes the browsing list complete in a way no single shop page can be. For what to do with the titles you find, the guide to buying a high-quality print of Locatelli's work online covers the retailer side in detail.

Once you have a list, the practical question is what to hang. A few titles circulate widely as reproductions, and it is worth comparing how different sellers frame the same image before choosing one.

A checklist for a thorough search

The pain point here is not scarcity, it is fragmentation. The works exist across a dozen small sources, and each one shows only a slice. Running the checklist below in order takes an evening and gives you reasonable confidence that you have seen most of what is findable online. Keep a simple list of titles as you go, because the same painting often appears under slightly different names.

When the list is done, decide which images are actually worth wall space. A portrait reads differently from a landscape or a still life, and the guide to Locatelli's most frequent subjects helps you judge which titles are characteristic and which are oddities. Size matters too, and the sizing guide for small living rooms covers the practical constraints.

What to expect when the search ends

Set expectations honestly. A mid-century Italian painter with a scattered body of work will never have the online footprint of Monet or Klimt. You may find twenty titles or you may find fifty, and some of the best-documented works will exist only as low-resolution scans. That is a limit of the record, not of your searching.

The upside is that his death in the mid-1940s places his work firmly in the public domain in most jurisdictions, so anything you find can be reproduced freely. Retailers respond to demand, and a title with no edition available today may appear within months. If a specific image matters to you, check back periodically rather than treating the search as finished. For a sense of how different reproductions present the same painting, it helps to look at how a framed poster and a canvas edition diverge in feel.