Portrait of Guido Reni

According to contemporary sources, Leoni was able to make a thoroughly convincing likeness after a single view. It is hard to believe that Ottavio Leoni’s extremely sensitive images were made after only a glance (as opposed to a single sitting), but certainly chalk drawings, typically in two tones, were made to produce a quick record. Leoni’s repertory of sitters brings a large number of personalities from early seventeenth-century Rome to life. The sitters are not idealised and sometimes look older than they were, as in the 1614 portrait of Guido Reni.