Five Grotesque Heads
Medium
pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash over black chalk
Dimensions
{"sheet":{"height":0.295,"width":0.202}}
Classification
Drawing
Department
Drawings
Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Credit
Gift of Frederick M. Mayer
Accession Number
1969.277
Tags
male
About this artwork
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.