The origins of caricature and the genius of Bernini

The birth of the graphic caricature is located in the university city of Bologna at the end of the 16th century, in the school of the Carracci. As a drawing genre, it represents a portrait with exaggerated facial and behavioral features, in order to produce laughter or ridicule situations of various kinds. The students of the academy of those Bolognese painters amused themselves by making caricatures of visitors, under the appearance of animals or inanimate objects, but they generally did it for private use, without the malice of satire that the genre would gain centuries later.

However, caricature, from the Italian "caricare", is a child of the Baroque. Bernini's multifaceted genius was admired at the papal court for his skill to reflect the essence of people. The master defined caricature as"an attempt to discover likeness in deformity, in such a way that we come closer to the truth than to reality itself". Cardinals, knights and even the pontiff himself passed through Bernini's eye. In the "Diary of the Journey to France", written by Paul Fréart de Chantelou, he recounts in great detail the entire stay of the brilliant artist in Paris in 1665. Among its pages we read a few lines about the novelty that the genre had then at the French court:"Mr. Marshal Villeroy came to see the bust about twelve o'clock, and was the forerunner of the king, who came immediately after with a large number of people. The Chevalier began to shape the nose, which was not yet more than sketched. M. de Créqui having come forward to speak to the king in his ear, the Chevalier said laughing: These gentlemen have the king at their disposal all day and do not want to leave him to me only average hour; I am tempted to make a caricatured portrait of one of them. Nobody understood that, I told the king that they were portraits in which people were found to resemble each other in the ugly and the ridiculous. Abbé Tutti took the floor and said that the Chevalier was admirable in that class of portraits; that it would be necessary to show some of them to His Majesty."

Subsequently, interest in caricature grew in Europe and later in the United States. Tiepolo and Goya made their forays into caricature, but it was not until the 19th century that the great names linked to satirical publications emerged.

A Corellan from the Age of Enlightenment: Don Antonio Escudero y Muro

From the house of the Escudero de Corella family came important characters studied by Arrese in his Collection of local biographies in its different branches. The family was originally from La Rioja and some of its members occupied, from the 15th century, important positions in the municipality and in the Kingdom. In 1656 the entailed estate was founded, to which the house and the chapel of Santa Teresa del Carmen were linked, with its titular canvas by Pedro Orrente. The Escudero family was linked to important local lineages such as the Sesma, Peralta, Muro and Luna.

One of the most egregious and of whom memories are preserved in the halls of the same mansion that were shown to us a few years ago by Don Juan Escudero, was Don Antonio Escudero y Muro, who became Grand Prior of the Order of Jerusalem in Navarra, commander of the Windward squadron of Philip V and Steward, in Rome, of James III, pretender to the throne of England.

Arrese made a biographical sketch of the personage taking data, as he writes, from a work dedicated to his ancestor by Don Miguel Escudero y Arévalo. Don Antonio was born in Corella in 1690, wore the habit of Malta early, in 1701, and professed in that Order in 1707, which he served militarily. In 1716, he was granted the command of Leache and later others, soon after which he went on to serve in the Spanish navy, performing valiant actions in 1718 in Sicilian waters. In 1719 he was promoted to captain of frigate, in 1721 of navy and in 1726 he was given the command of the Escuadra de Barlovento, in charge of repressing smuggling in the Antilles. In 1740, on the occasion of the War of the Austrian Succession, he was ordered to arm his ships in Malta in privateering against the English, but as the Order of St. John maintained a position contrary to that of the King of Spain, he could not obey and was relieved from his position.

In 1741 he was appointed Grand Prior of the Order of St. John in Navarre and, shortly thereafter, Admiral of the Malta Squadron. At that time, in the struggles of James III to seize the English throne, the Order of Malta helped the pretender and Don Antonio intervened with his squadron to that end, becoming his steward, position in which he remained until 1766 when James Stuard died.

Don Antonio died in 1770, at the age of eighty. In Malta a funerary monument was dedicated to him at report, of which a contemporary drawing is preserved.

His caricature by the great master Ghezzi in 1749

The author of the caricature of Don Antonio is Pier Leone Ghezzi (1674-1755), a famous Italian painter, author of numerous official portraits of the Rome of his time and son-in-law of the painter Carlo Maratta. He owes his greatest fame to his numerous caricatures of people of all kinds subject that he painted in the Rome of his time, including prominent prelates, nobles, artists, pilgrims and visitors to the Eternal City. In all of them, as Bernini recommended, the physical features of the figures' faces are exaggerated with skill. The British Museum has an album that entered its collections in 1859, which contains a large number of caricatures by Ghezzi. Despite his social position, Ghezzi did not disdain to portray visitors to Rome for a small fee. One of the caricatures is that of Antonio Escudero.

The drawing is numbered at the top right with the number issue 95. On its original registration , by Ghezzi, it reads:"Il Sr Gran Prior di Navarra spagniolo cav.r di Malta fatto da me cav.r Ghezzi li 5 ottobre 1749". Later it was completed with these words:"Presentemente è maestro di camera del Rè d'Inghliterra 1751". It is made on paper and measures 112 mm. high by 89 mm. wide.

The most accentuated features of the caricature, as is usually the case in others, are the nose on which the quevedos are mounted and the large half-open mouth. He has a clear forehead with incipient baldness typical of his age at that time -fifty-nine years old- and long hair, and he wears a jacket. This is possibly the first known caricature of a Navarrese.