A pen and ink drawing of a male opera singer performing, standing to front, holding a mace in his left hand and with his right hand to his chest; wearing a fur cap, a short wig, a wide-skirted tunic and a scimitar. Inscribed, verso, lower left corner: J S. 

This is a caricature of Carlo Scalzi, a castrato who sang in Venice between 1719 and 1738, always at the Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo. He may be represented in this drawing as Arsace in Leonardo Vinci's La Rosmira fedele, 1725.  

This drawing belongs to an album of operatic caricatures mainly by Marco Ricci and Anton Maria Zanetti the Elder, an intact album from the library of Joseph Smith. Zanetti and another Venetian collector, Francesco Algarotti, owned similar albums, with many of the caricatures copied or traced, with identifying inscriptions. Zanetti's album is now in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, and Algarotti's belongs to Albert Gellman and is in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. There is a version of this drawing in the Algarotti-Gellman Album: Croft-Murray no. 26. Scalzi also appears in Zanetti's album of caricatures in the Fondazione Cini.  

Opera was an important part of Venetian society and culture, and such caricatures were circulated among friends and collectors for light-hearted amusement. Joseph Smith was a keen opera lover who was married to the English opera singer Catherine Tofts and kept a box at the Teatro San Grisostomo in Venice. He collected operatic caricatures of the singers and performers of the day as well as artists and other well-known characters by Marco Ricci and others, and had them bound into this album. The drawings were shared and circulated among the three collectors and their circle as light-hearted amusement, but the artistic caricature was also a long established practice in Italian art.