Ottavio Maria Leoni

Expressive and spontaneously drawn, this handsome portrait by Ottavio Leoni depicts Pietro Paolo Melchiorri (d. 1650). The sitter was from a Roman noble family and Leoni depicted him in two other black chalk drawings, executed in April and May of the same year, 1615, one now in the Louvre and the other in a private collection.¹ As Yuri Primarosa remarks these were most probably preparatory for a painting to celebrate Pietro's wedding to Isabella Camajani. The first of the drawn portraits illustrates the noble gentleman with a wide and extravagant ruff. In the second, the sitter is seen in profile, with his hair highly coiffed.

This portrait and the other two versions belong to a corpus of more than four hundred drawings by the artist and some by his son Ippolito, which according to Giovanni Baglione were in the collection of the Prince Marcantonio Borghese (1601-1658), in 1642.² Baglione's biography, the only contemporary commentary on the artist's life, tells us that Ottavio Leoni was the leading portraitist of his time, in both drawings and paintings, but hardly any of the numerous painted portraits by the artist that are mentioned in old inventories, many of them made for his patron Scipione Borghese, have been identified.³

It seems that on 9 October 1630, shortly after Ottavio's sudden death, all the drawings that he left to his son Ippolito, and all the paintings left to his wife, were sold to Cardinal Scipione Borghese (see Provenance).

1. Primarosa, op.cit., cat. nos. 330 and 331

2. G. Baglione, Le vite de' pittori, scultori, architetti ed intagliatori, dal ponteficato di Gregorio XIII dal 1572, fino a'tempi di Papa Urbano VIII nel 1642, Rome 1642, p. 321

3.  Ibid, pp. 321-322; C.R. Robbin, 'Scipione Borghese's acquisition of paintings and drawings by Ottavio Leoni,' The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 138, July 1996, pp. 453-454