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. Opera was an important part of Venetian society and culture, and such caricatures were circulated among friends and collectors for light-hearted amusement.

See also the Zanetti album of caricatures in the Fondazione Cini: inv, 36412. There is a version of this drawing in the Algarotti-Gellman Album: Croft-Murray no. 5. 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. Zanetti and another Venetian collector, Francesco Algarotti, owned similar albums, with many of the caricatures copied or traced, with identifying inscriptions. 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. In this drawing he is probably represented in the role of Scipione in Tomaso Albinoni's Scipione nelle Spagne, performed at the Teatro San Samuele in 1724.

This is a caricature of Giovanni Battista Minelli, recorded as singing at various theatres in Venice between 17. A pen and ink drawing of a male opera singer in the role of a Greek or Roman general: walking in profile to the left, with a baton in his right hand wearing a laurel-crowned full-bottom wig, a wide-skirted tunic, a cloak and a sword.

Giovanni minelli