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Five Grotesque Heads
Gaetano Gandolfi (Italian, 1734–1802)
1750–1800
- Medium
- pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash over black chalk
- Classification
- Drawing
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 29.5 x 20.2 cm (11 5/8 x 7 15/16 in.)
- Culture
- Italy
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Drawings
- Credit line
- Gift of Frederick M. Mayer
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
From an early age, Gaetano Gandolfi was admired for his drawings, many of which were created as independent works of art and avidly collected by Italian and British patrons. This drawing is one of Gandolfi’s so-called teste pittoriche, or pictorial heads. Devised by the artist in the 1770s, this genre is based on contemporary academic theories that proposed that human emotions could be scientifically classified by facial expressions.
