Hogarth and Garrick. Or, the British model for the nineteenth-century actor in Italy

Starting from a discussion of Hogarth’s portrait of the great actor David Garrick playing Richard III, this essay explores the relationship that existed between Hogarth and Garrick and analyses the artistic and aesthetic affinities between the artist and the actor. The diffusion of this picture all around Europe, especially thanks to its engraved version, allows the author to show how it quickly became a ‘portrait manifesto’, championing a move to natural acting on stage and greatly influencing actors’ style of performance. In the particular case of Italy in the first part of the nineteenth century, the portrait became a paradigm for Italian theatre critics and reviewers and a model for dramatic actors.