Pier Leone Ghezzi

The artist’s earliest documented work is the signed and dated Landscape with St Francis (1698; Montefortino, Pin. Com.). In 1708 he was appointed the painter of the Camera Apostolica for Pope Clement XI and became curator for the Papal collection. Clement XI gave him his most important official commission—a series of six canvases from the Life of Clement XI (1712–15; Urbino, Palazzo Ducale) for the papal palace in Castelgandolfo. They are innovative in their anecdotal and realistic approach. He contributed also to the decoration of the reconstructed San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome, Clement XI’s most visible public project, with an oval canvas of the Prophet Micah (1718) which remains in situ in the towering nave.

Ghezzi was patronized by Roman high society, chief among them, Alessandro Falconieri, for whom he painted the decorative fresco cycles in the Castello di Torrimpietra (1712–32) and the Villa Falconieri at Frascati (1724–34). The latter prominently features the local landscape in luminous colours. The artist’s interest in the picturesque coincides with his friendship with Giovanni Paolo Panini, an artist he collaborated with for the design of theatrical displays in the Académie de France in 1729. Like Tiepolo’s frescoes along the river Brenta, Ghezzi playfully inserted well–observed family portraits as well as illusionistic architectural details. This penchant for theatricality can be found in canvases such as the Return of the Prodigal Son (Minneapolis, Minneapolis Institute of Art) and the Lateran Council (1725; Raleigh, North Carolina Museum of Art).

Through the French academy and Cardinal Melchoir de Polignac (1666–1742), French ambassador to the Holy See, Ghezzi built up a following among French nobility in Rome, as he also did with the influx there of British Grand Tourists. And it is for the large number of spirited caricatural portraits of these visitors that Ghezzi is now best known. Among Ghezzi’s most celebrated caricatures are those of Dr. James Hay as a Bear Leader (London, British Museum), those of Joseph Leeson and Joseph Henry (Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art) and that of Baron von Stosch and a group of Roman Antiquarians (Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina). However, Ghezzi’s range in this genre was prodigious. It included portraits of fellow artists such as Paolo de Matteis and Pompeo Batoni, indeed just about anyone who was anyone in early 18^th-century Rome. Ghezzi’s caricatures were the most complete record of life and the people, high and low, in the Eternal City. They were not mean-spirited and had none of the bite of the slightly later caricatures of Zanotti and Tiepolo in Venice. Ghezzi’s portraits, almost always in the instantly recognizable pen and ink outlines with striated lines and sometimes a little wash, were more like rapidly executed, unidealized mementos than satirical caricatures. The American 20^th-century art historian Tony Clark was the first to devote serious attention to the artist, and called for a recognition of his work beyond his famous caricatures.