Gaetano Gandolfi San Matteo della Decima near Bologna 1734 - 1802 Bologna

Sale, London, Sotheby's, 3 July 1995, lot 130

This sheet of studies can be associated with other, similarly elaborate and elegantly composed capricci of heads by Gaetano Gandolfi, some of which have been connected by Donatella Biagi Maino with a group of prints after Gandolfi, executed by Luigi Tadolini (see D. Biagi Maino, 'Gaetano Gandolfi's 'capricci' of heads: drawings and engravings', The Burlington Magazine, CXXXVI, no. 1095, June 1994, pp. 375-379).  An album of twenty engravings by Tadolini is in the Bibliothèque d'Art et d'Archéologie Jacques Doucet in Paris; this album bears the title: Raccolta di Teste pittoriche inventate e disegnate a penna dal Sig. G. Gandolfi Accademico Clementino ed incise in rame da Luigi Tadolfini.  Dottoressa Biagi Maino suggests that these engravings were conceived as 'a repertory of human types'.  She also observes that Gaetano was already making drawings of this type in the 1770s (see, for example, the sheet of studies of four heads, dated 1777, in the Castello Sforzesco in Milan), and continued to produce them for the rest of the century, apparently for private collectors, with whom these drawings were very popular.  These studies were imitated by other artists, and drawings of this type by Mauro Gandolfi in particular are sometimes difficult to separate from those of this father Gaetano (see lot 73).