Pier Leone Ghezzi

Pier Leone Ghezzi held one of the best jobs a painter could have in early-18th-century Rome. He was Pittore della Camera Apostolica, official painter to the papal household, protected by Pope Clement XI, and his godfather at the font had been Carlo Maratta, the leading Roman painter of the previous generation. He supplied the altarpieces and decorative frescoes such a post required.

He is remembered for something he did on the side. With a few quick strokes of the pen Ghezzi drew the people around him with their features gently exaggerated, and he did it thousands of times. Cardinals and aristocrats sat for these sketches, and so did musicians, craftsmen, clerks and the British tourists passing through Rome on the Grand Tour. Historians often call him the first professional caricaturist, the man who turned a private joke into a steady practice.

Those albums of drawings are why his name survives today, more than the official canvases. Ghezzi worked in Rome all his life and died there in 1755, past 80.