Gaetano Gandolfi

Hinge mounted. There is evidence of light foxing throughout with some small areas of light brown staining to the edges. The pen and ink medium is still fresh.
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This sheet of head studies can be closely compared to other similarly composed capricci which Gaetano Gandolfi made to be sold as finished works, and which were in great demand with private collectors.  Some of these attractive studies were also engraved by Luigi Tadolini, after Gaetano's drawings, and are mentioned by the biographer Marcello Oretti in his Notizie de' Professori del Disegno, compiled in the 1790s.¹  Donatella Biagi has pointed out that Gaetano must already have been producing these studies in the 1770s, when the classification of expressions and emotions through facial expression was a subject of intense debate and very much a fashionable intellectual cultural trend.  See also lot 73.

1.  D. Biagi Maino, 'Gaetano Gandolfi's capricci of heads: drawings and engravings', The Burlington Magazine, CXXXVI, June 1994, pp. 375-379