A pen and ink drawing of a male opera singer in the role of a Roman Emperor or General: standing with his head turned in profile to the left; holding a baton; wearing a laurel-crowned, full-bottom wig, a wide-skirted lorica and a cloak. Inscribed, verso, lower right corner: J S. This is a caricature of Domenico Gizzi, known as Egizio, who performed at the Teatro San Giovanni Grisostomo in 1729, and at the Teatro San Cassiano 1724-5. He is also represented in RCIN 907310, 907314 and 907317

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 of eighteenth-century Venetian operatic caricatures (Croft-Murray no. 35) and another in Anton Maria 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.