During the early modern period, caricature emerged as a genre that made possible the exploration of the comic and the grotesque in draftsmanship. Many caricatures featured dwarfs, and the occasional giant, which served as visual topoi of extreme contrasts to heighten the comic effect of an image. Caricatures were first referred to as ritratti ridicoli (ridiculous portraits) in a manuscript by Giulio Mancini (1559–1630), an art critic and physician in seventeenth-century Rome. Mancini described caricature as a drawing that exaggerated a subject's “natural defects,” flaws that were already present and selectively fine-tuned for comic effect. The biographer Filippo Baldinucci (1624–1696), one of the earliest writers to document the practice of caricature, defined the new genre of caricatura in his Vocabolario toscano dell’arte del disegno (Tuscan Vocabulary of the Art of Drawing, 1681) as a playful portrait that disproportionately increased imperfections. Physical flaws, whether a large nose or a weak chin, were distorted to poke fun at the sitter. The features of non-normative bodies, including hunchbacks, the lame (zoppi), and dwarfs, were appropriated as comic strategy to produce ridiculous portraits. Height, in deficiency or excess, was an easy feature for artists to manipulate to create humorous interpretations of their subjects, a pictorial maneuver that plays into the contemporary societal obsessions with giants and dwarfs.