Head of a Woman with an Elaborate Headdress

Author: Rhoda Eitel-Porter

This beautiful profile view of a female head, delicately drawn in metalpoint on a smooth, lightly prepared cream-coloured paper, is one of the museum’s more intriguing drawings. About its provenance nothing further is known than that it entered the collection in 1923 as part of a larger donation by the Dutch collector Adriaan Domela Nieuwenhuis; it has since remained unpublished. The darkened area in all four corners suggests that it was once pasted down, maybe in an album.

In the Domela Nieuwenhuis inventory the drawing was merely described as by an anonymous Italian artist, possibly from Rome.^[1] It was later more narrowly classified as by an artist from the circle of Michelangelo (1475-1564), and dated c.1525-30. Indeed, Michelangelo’s series of highly wrought ideal female heads seen in profile, with elaborate, fantastical hairstyles incorporating headpieces, long braids, caps or partial hairnets, drawn in black chalk, come to mind. The drawing in London^[2] of a female head, in profile to the left, with braided hair and wearing a headdress with a fish-scale panel, from 1525-28, is a good comparison. Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) dubbed these drawings ‘teste divine’ (divine heads) in reference to their subjects, but also as an indication of their creator’s high regard.^[3] The artist presented three of these heads to the young Florentine nobleman Gherardo Perini in the early 1520s.^[4] Yet the features of the young woman in the Rotterdam study are too delicately feminine for it to be a copy after a lost drawing by Michelangelo, whose female figures tend to be more robust, with a larger, prominent nose, fuller lips and stronger chin, all executed in more crisply drawn detail.

As kindly pointed out by Grant Lewis, there exists another version of the Rotterdam female head, also in London, probably drawn no earlier than the 1560s.^[5] The motif is about the same size as the Rotterdam study although the sheet is slightly larger. It too is in metalpoint, but on a grey rather than cream-coloured prepared surface. It is one of a series of eleven drawings seemingly by the same hand in this technique, all presumed to be copies, formerly attributed to Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and now thought to be by a Netherlandish artist working in Italy. One of the drawings, showing three skulls, rearranges motifs from an etching^[6] by Giovanni Battista Franco (before 1510-1561) dated 1563. Differences between the British Museum and Rotterdam studies of a female head indicate that both were derived from a common source.   

Michelangelo-inspired ideal heads became a popular motif for Italian artists from the late 1520s until the end of the century. These include three female heads in Paris,^[7] tentatively given to Giulio Clovio (1498-1578) by Paul Joannides^[8] and a copy attributed to Francesco Salviati (1510-1563) last exhibited in Caen in 2011.^[9] Mention should also be made of the head of a young female in profile to the left, apparently drawn in black chalk, which came on the art market in Paris.^[10] It is tentatively attributed to Clovio, but displays a strong inflection of Emilian art and may not be by him.^[11] A series of at least seven female heads seen in strict profile, usually published under the name of Jacopo Ligozzi (1547-1627), although probably not by him, also come to mind.^[12] They are drawn in pen and ink, with a swelling line and copious cross-hatching. One of them also shows a female head with two tight braids joined at the base of the neck.^[13] The series differs markedly however in handling and style from other drawings by Ligozzi and their attribution has been rejected by Lucilla Conigliello.^[14] None of the known examples of ideal heads, however, seem to be by the same hand as the Rotterdam sheet.

Although Michelangelo is most closely associated with these types of heads, it is worth noting that similar images predate his work. One need only think of Florence in the 1480s and 1490s, with examples such as the purported likenesses of Simonetta Vespucci (c.1453-1476) painted by Sandro Botticelli (c.1445-1510) or Piero di Cosimo (1462-1521), now respectively in Berlin and Chantilly.^[15] Profile portraits of these types were also produced in northern Italy in Leonardo’s wake. Like some of these examples, but unlike most of Michelangelo’s teste divine, the Rotterdam drawing could be envisaged as a portrait, in which case the slight crescent at the top of the head, above the roll of hair framing the face, might suggest a likeness in the guise of the goddess Diana.

An origin well outside the circle of Michelangelo is also suggested by the medium of metalpoint. By the 1520s, metalpoint was used only sporadically in Italy, as observed by Hugo Chapman in a catalogue essay on the use of metalpoint during the Renaissance.^[16] Raphael (1483-1520) was one of the last major artists to use it extensively for several drawings in 1515-16;^[17] his pupil Perino del Vaga (1501-1547) deployed it once, for a study on pale green prepared paper for a fresco in San Marcello in Rome, in c.1519.^[18] One example by Parmigianino (1503-1540) is known, a Head of a Young Woman, in Cambridge,^[19] thought to date from c.1524-25 when Parmigianino was working in Rome, on grounds of style. An undated drawing in London,^[20] possibly by Parmigianino’s associate Girolamo Mazzola Bedoli (c.1500-1569), in metalpoint on dark grey prepared paper, suggests that the medium was still in use in Parmigianino’s circle in the 1520s. Several more artists may have experimented with the technique – even Vasari used the medium once in around 1540.^[21] The Rotterdam drawing may well date from late in the third decade of the sixteenth century, but depending on the artistic origins, it might also be from a somewhat earlier or later moment.