Self-portrait

Pier Leone Ghezzi spent his life in Rome catching people at their least flattering. He is often called the first professional caricaturist, filling albums with quick, sharp drawings of cardinals, aristocrats, musicians and the British tourists passing through on the Grand Tour, each one reduced to a few telling strokes. Yet he was also a serious painter of altarpieces and formal portraits for popes and princes. In this self-portrait he gives himself none of the exaggeration he handed everyone else, meeting our eye with a calm, composed face. Around 1725, when this was painted, he was at the height of his Roman career, working for the papal court.