* Pier Leone Ghezzi Rome 1674 - 1755

Herbert Feist Gallery, New York;
John and Alice Steiner

Cambridge, Mass., Fogg Art Museum, et. al., Renaissance and Baroque Drawings from the Collections of John and Alice Steiner, 1977, cat. no. 16

This is a typical example of Ghezzi's work as a caricaturist, but unfortunately the sitter is not identified.  A number of albums of the artist's caricatures are known: one is in the Vatican Library, and another, from the collection of Lord Braybrooke, was dispersed at Sotheby's, London, on 10 December 1979.  Three further albums appeared on the market in the early 1970s: one of these is now in the Pierpont Morgan Library but the other two, which contained a total of eighty-nine caricatures, were broken up.  Both title pages and four other sheets are now in the Metropolitan Museum (see Jacob Bean and William Griswold, 18th Century Italian Drawings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1990, pp. 83-87).