1775
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Five Grotesque Heads is a 1775 by Gaetano Gandolfi, a Rococo painting work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see five faces stacked in a column, each twisted into a different ugly grin or scowl. Gandolfi drew these to test a theory: that every feeling could be read like a map on the human face. He made dozens of these “pictorial heads” in the 1770s, treating emotion like a science experiment. If you like these strange faces, look up sfumato next.
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.
The term "grotesque" derives from the Italian word "grotteschi," which refers to the grottoes found in ancient Roman houses that were rediscovered around 1500.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Gaetano Gandolfi (31 August 1734 – 20 June 1802) was an Italian painter, draughtsman and sculptor of the late Baroque period, mainly active in and around Bologna.
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