Bust of an Elderly Man with Caricatured Features

This marble relief depicts an exaggerated male head in profile—a nose prominent and hooked, features simplified and sharpened for comic effect. The work represents an early example of caricature as a sculptural practice, predating the golden age of print satire by a century. Rather than targeting a specific individual or political moment, this bust demonstrates how artists have long used distortion and exaggeration to provoke amusement and scrutiny. The technique would eventually inform the etched and engraved caricatures of Hogarth, Gillray, and later satirists, establishing visual comedy as a tool for social observation. Here, carved in stone rather than rendered on paper, the exaggerated visage anticipates the graphic traditions from which modern comics descended.