Pubblicato sulla Rivista Paragone diretta da Roberto Longhi, n. 165, Rizzoli Editore, Milano 1963, con articolo di Anthony M.Clark: “Pierleone Ghezzi’s Portraits” , tav. 16 ANTHONY M. CLARK Ghezzi followed the new developments in serious portraiture in Rome with his usual thoroughness. He carefully recorded Liotard’s visit and sensibly found Subleyras 'bravo pittore e bravissimo nei ritratti’. The newest French fashions and artists were especially interesting and, among others, Edme Bouchardon became an intimate. The portrait Ghezzi painted of the sculptor in 1732 /plate 15/ can be compared to its advantage with Watteau’s late portrait of the sculptor Antoine Pater or with any other comparable French portrait. There is a disciplined return of the youthful dramatic power tempered by the modest and genial needs of the Rococo. The paint has become more transparent and less dry; the flourish of the brush is not decorative late Baroque bravura but supple, elegantly robust and suggestive. This kind of handling we first noticed at Torre di Pietra and in the second Uffizi self portrait; now it is completely successful. Painted with greater solidity, with less luminosity and with a gayer palette, the 'Portrait as Shepherdess’ /plate 16/ is as far as Ghezzi goes towards the contemporary French painting. One is immediately reminded of Goudreaux’s slightly risqué romanticism, but the sensuality is less fleeting and as robust and whole-some as a gaudy piece of cake. If the purpose and kind are different, the careful rhetoric strikingly remind one of the self- portrait in my third illustration. Portraits of similar young things were common in 'Europe and especially Paris from the second decade of the century down to the 1760s, and it is worth noting that La Grenée contributed to the Salon of, 1763 a frumpish 'La douce captivité’ which almost seems to- use this Ghezzi. The 'Shepherdess’ is of course especially appropriate to Arcadian Rome and Ghezzi’s painting, which I would date in the second half of the 1720s, is close to the style Carle Vanloo began to adopt in Rome in the same years. My last illustration shows a more domestic, almost mousey young lady nestling her kitten /plate 17/. By costume I suppose this gracious portrait to date around 1740. Ghezzi has relaxed into his older and more native habits and one thinks not of French painting but of the Venetian school. The portrait has in fact been attributed to Rotari although, with its lack of Rotari’s aulic tautness and its superficially clumsey spontaneity, a better guess would have been Pietro Longhi. It attempts little more than Longhi but the artist was more sophisticated and surely a more mature human being. Although the 'Young Lady with Kitten’ is a denizen of the world of J.-F. de Troy the handling of the brush recalls older and quite characteristic moments in Ghezzi’s career: the neck-piece is done with the loose, suggestive method of Torre di Pietra; the treatment of the close-cropped hair recalls Cardinal Annibale’s portrait; the cat would be at home in the early genre subjects. The young lady nestling her kitten would appear vague and faceless set beside a good French or British portrait of the second half of the century, or at least beside a portrait that dared step outside, for a moment, the Ancien Régime. Rome was necessarily an old-fashioned city in the 18th Century and portraits which satisfy those intellectual and humanistic virtues European painting has been occupied with - at times - since 1750 are few and far between. Ghezzi’s oil portraits are not among these exceptions and their intellectual virtues, whatever the aesthetic qualities, are negligible.