The Fitzwilliam Museum

Galileo and his contemporaries: portraits by Ottavio Leoni (1578-1630)

Tue 2 November 2010 - Sun 13 February 2011

Fitzwilliam Museum

The Fitzwilliam Museum houses almost all of Ottavio Leoni’s portrait prints, made in Rome in the last decade of his life. In 1642 his biographer Giovanni Baglione wrote, ‘in all Rome there was no one who had not his portrait by Ottavio - whether prince, princess, gentlemen, or persons of private rank - and not a house in which some portrait from the hand of the cavaliere was not to be seen’. Leoni used a subtle technique of stippled dots to convey every nuance of flesh and detail of feature in his closely observed portraits, bringing to life the personalities of contemporary artists, poets, mathematicians and dignitaries. So naturalistic are his depictions, that his print of Galileo has recently been used as evidence to investigate the astronomer’s deteriorating eyesight. Part of the Hidden Depths series of exhibitions exploring aspects of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s permanent collections.

Cost: free