CAFFI. Volto di donna. Macchietta veneziana.

Tasty and caricatural sketch of a grim person in profile. Ippolito Caffi was a painter and watercolorist, a character from the adventurous life, made numerous trips to the East, reporting sketches and paintings, he participated in the movements for Italian Independence, depicting real episodes of war. In maturity he also devoted himself to the study of ‘macchiette’, as evidenced by various works such as the watercolor painting he himself called “Venetian popular Macchiette” of 1849, or of two very small views of the Marciana audience recently passed through the antique market. These last ones show La Piazzetta di notte and Francesco Giuseppe and Elisabetta's arrival in Venice and are animated by the presence of small specks, very similar in the morphology of the crowd of characters that stop in front of the basilica in the picture “The Basilica of San Marco and the Piazzetta” of 1858.

In 2009, the Correr Museum presented in an exhibition dedicated to 19th century Venetian drawings, several 'macchiette' taken from the sketchbooks of the famous painter: "Here is the great Ippolito Caffi (1809-1866), a landscape artist now freed from the eighteenth century suggestions , Risorgimento and heroic, in love with the 'people' (common people at rest, Austrian police, sailors waiting to be hired, some Oriental men, masks): the Venice of a beggaring and submissive nineteenth century who seeks redemption in mockery or in the gesture of rebellion, fixed in watercolors notebooks or in sketched views on agendine 'moleskine' ante-litteram. "