Pietro Antonio Novelli, Sixteen Figures, Pen and sepia ink on paper cut at the corners, 93 × 145 mm, Private Collection | © Matteo DeFina

The common thread that runs through the new exhibition curated by the institution led by Inti Ligabue has a multiform face, with an altered or deformed physiognomy, which, portrayed or evoked starting from Leonardo da Vinci himself, spans the centuries changing its features up to the Twentieth Century, when finally transfigured, takes on new meanings powerfully evoked in Francis Bacon's masterpiece Three Studies for a Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne which closes the exhibition. From Leonardo to the Tiepolos, from Francesco Melzi to Arcimboldo, from Carracci to Parmigianino - just some of the many artists on display, with over 75 works from museums and international private collections - the exhibition at Palazzo Loredan reveals the existence of a "northern" continuity within the genre of caricature, or rather of the deformation and transformation of the physiognomic features which, starting precisely from Leonardo's "monstrous faces" and from the "ridiculous paintings" of the Lombards, through Carracci's naturalism, reached its peak in Lagoon in the first half of the Eighteenth Century.

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