How did you all go about the solving the darkest puzzle statues.

Me and a friend just spent about 4-5 hours figuring out this puzzle, only took about 10 minutes to figure out that we needed to relate artist pictures to the murals
(which was sheer luck based off us literally just going down a rabbit hole and recently looking at Giovanni Paolo Panini works) and then it was just hours of combing through artist work. I tried doing a cipher for the plaques to real names and had no luck. I have seen people saying that they just searched a list of architect artist and just did plaque number to name number but that doesn't make sense to me as Giovanni Paolo Panini had 6 letters while his name is quite longer and its not like each plaque had only last names. If anyone else solved it without a guide I would love to know what method you used.