Ghezzi’s early biographer, Nicola Pio, tells us that Pier Leone’s father, the artist Giuseppe Ghezzi, forced him to draw from the model with pen and ink only, a medium that allows for no corrections. This early discipline might account for Ghezzi’s unerring facility with the pen and the fact that he chose that medium for his caricatures, the ink usually being very dark. The inscription that Ghezzi himself wrote beneath this drawing tells us that the genial physician who has just wandered into our field of vision is the nephew of Dr. Romanelli and had arrived in Rome just over a week ago (his hat is still under his arm) to practice medicine with his uncle at an abbey belonging to the Albani family. Ghezzi saw him there and drew from memory. It is not known whether the artist, then seventy-eight years old, visited the doctor in the capacity of patient, but if he did, and whatever his ailment, administration by enema of any pharmaceutical a doctor favored, or had invented, was the cure of choice in the eighteenth century. This common aspect of medical practice gave rise to a host of caricatures ranging from the scurrilous to the ridiculous (see Posner, Donald. “Watteau’s Reclining Nude and the ‘Remedy’ Theme.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 54, no. 4 {December 1972}, pp. 383-89). Mimi Cazort, from Italian Master Drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2004), cat. 43.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Philadelphia Museum of Art. Ars Medica: Art, Medicine, and the Human Condition. Exhibition catalogue by Diane Karp et al. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1985. no. 35, repro.