Giovanni Francesco Melzi
Giovanni Francesco Melzi belongs to the circle of High Renaissance Milanese drawing, and his surviving sheets are prized for their spirited pen work in brown ink. Grotesque heads and caricatural couples form a distinctive strand of that activity, rendered with quick, incisive line. The archive holds a single sheet by him, dated by the Met to the close of the fifteenth century and executed throughout in pen and brown ink. Its subject, a grotesque couple pairing an old woman in an elaborate headdress with an old man of large ears and no chin, captures the period's taste for exaggerated physiognomy.
1 works in the collection · All public domain (CC0)
