The sitter of this charming and very personal little portrait, Giovanni Gabrielli, also called 'Il Sivello', shown here half-length wearing a somewhat defiant expression and holding a mask in his hands, was a famous actor of the Commedia dell'Arte in Rome. The engraving was created by Agostino Carracci, member of the leading artistic family from Bologna of the last decades of the 16th century, whose oeuvre mark the shift from Mannerism to the Baroque in Italy. If Ludovico and Annibale were highly talented painters, Agostino was the engraver of the family, with his distinctive technique of swelling lines he had assimilated from the Dutch engraver Cornelis Cort. Initially translating other artists' designs into the print medium, Agostino soon began to engrave his own compositions.
The portrait can be dated to circa 1599 when Agostino was in Rome, between 1597 and 1600, to assist his brother Annibale with the frescoes of the Farnese gallery. The present impression is of the second, final state. Only one impression of the first state, an unfinished proof with the only head and collar of the sitter engraved and the rest of the body sketched in black chalk, is known (Dukes of Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth).