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The work features Punchinello, the hook-nosed, humpbacked clowns who were some of the stock characters taken from the Commedia dell' Arte - an early form of professional theatre.

The great series of Punchinello drawings initiated by that gossamer-handed Venetian, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and vastly elaborated by his son Giovanni Domenico, was conceived as both a caprice and a social farce, one we can identity with today: a vision of a world run by venal clowns.

In profile she resembles a cute Punchinello, her cheeks expressive, painted, and the nose carved for comic effect.

Bleasdale, who then worked as a part-time waitress at a local Italian restaurant, Punchinello's in Chorley, showed an immediate aptitude for "flinging myself across a bar on a stick".

"I had to give up at Punchinello's but my sister still works there."