A little-known portrait of Giovanni Alfonso Borelli.

THE MOST commonly reproduced portrait of the mathematician and physiologist Giovanni Alfonso Borelli is a lithograph after Pierre Roch Vigneron (1789-1872).1 which forms one of a series of portraits of medical worthies by Vigneron lithographed by G. Engelmann as a commercial venture a century and a half after Borelli's death in 1679. I do not know the source of Vigneron's portrait, which shows a bland elderly man with flowing white hair and a skull cap, who is gazing sadly and rather vacantly into space. It is hard to believe that it can be a good likeness. There are also two small portraits in oil in the church of the Casa Generalizia of the Scuole Pie in Rome. The larger was painted by an unknown artist in 1706,2 the smaller, attached to a memorial tablet, somewhat later.3 Both are in need of restoration. In the Vatican Library, Codex Ottob. Lat. 3116 is a volume of 192 leaves containing sketches by Cavalier Pier Leone Ghezzi (1674-1755). Some of these are street scenes, some caricatures, some portraits. All are fluent and show the work ofa man of genuine talent. Folio 103r of this codex contains the red chalk drawing reproduced here. At the bottom is written in ink: