The book offers a refined selection of works within the art of Italian caricature between Milan, Bologna and Venice that testify the presence of a “northern” tradition continuously revived over the centuries. An excursus that starts from Leonardo, with an exceptional nucleus of autograph drawings, and traces in his epigones – from Giovanni Agostino da Lodi to Giuseppe Arcimboldo – the legacy of representations of deformed faces, anatomical exaggerations, physiognomic investigations, caricatural figures and galleries of human characters, intertwining it with the naturalism of Annibale and Agostino Carracci, until the triumphal revival of the genre among the Venetian painters of the first half of the eighteenth century: Marco Ricci, Giovan Battista Tiepolo, Anton Maria Zanetti and Carlo Lasinio.

In addition to the curator’s opening essay on the relationship between Leonardo and the revival of the genre in the eighteenth century, the catalogue includes a speech by Laura Corti on Annibale Carracci, contributions by Enrico Lucchese, Paola Cordera and Rosalba Antonelli on the diffusion of caricatures and Leonardesque heads in the eighteenth century Venice and on the collector’s universe of the time, finally Calvin Winner’s reflection on Francis Bacon’s commitment to the metamorphic portraiture.