The main character in this caricature wears the typical eighteenth-century Venetian carnival disguise known as a bautta, which in its most common fashions included a black cloak, hood, white mask with a prominent nose cut off halfway down the face, and tricorn on the head. Giambattista Tiepolo declined this invention in several sheets of caricatures, where the detail of the fur muff is always found, as here. 

The caricatured character here is subtle, the presence of the mask even denies an identity to the character’s face, and the comedy arises from the contrast between the excessive bulge of the short cloak that accentuates the corpulence of the figure and the slenderness of the lower limbs, with their peculiar curvature. 

 

The mask denies identity to the character’s face, and comedy arises from the contrast between the excessive bulge of the cloak that accentuates the figure’s corpulence and the slenderness of the peculiarly curved lower limbs.

In Giambattista’s ‘grand theater,’ the mask becomes his anti-hero because it exhibits, ‘in a spectacular dimension, the reality of primary, bodily needs, connected essentially with food: eating, evacuating, sleeping.’

Instead of depicting precise people, Giambattista Tiepolo draws masks in the flesh with the intention of showing that there is also a beauty of deformity.