Three Studies of Heads

Author: Gert Jan van der Sman

This drawing was credited to Francesco Granacci (?1469-1543) by Bernard Berenson in 1938. According to Berenson, the sheet had previously been attributed to Giovanni Battista Naldini (1537-1591). He moreover made a reservation about his own attribution: ‘but if not by Granacci, is it possibly by an Italianate Fleming?’ He appeared to be referring here to the true-to-life rendition of the woman with the downcast gaze. We do not find such an outspoken form of naturalism in Granacci’s drawn oeuvre.

The Rotterdam drawing is largely executed in black chalk on red prepared paper. A few highlights were carefully added in white chalk on the woman’s sleeve and elsewhere. The drawing is rather worn and the lines have consequently lost definition. Nevertheless, it is easy to see that the draughtsman handled the chalk with great finesse. The face and clothes of the woman with the headscarf are particularly finely finished. It is as good as certain that the central figure was drawn from life. The head of a girl in the upper right corner, on the other hand, appears to have been sketched from the imagination, while the head of a young man in profile was probably derived from an antique sculpture in marble or bronze. The drawing is a typical study sheet.

In the collection Italian Drawings 1400-1600 this study is the hardest to place. The combination of red prepared paper and black and white chalk brings to mind both artists from the Florentine school and artists from Northern Italy. Lazzaro Tavarone (1556-1641) in the city of Genoa liked to make chalk drawings on red prepared paper at the end of the sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth.^[1] In those works, however, the outlines are more heavily drawn and the figures are livelier. The rather static nature of the image and the fine draughtsmanship probably point to a date before 1550. As far as the woman’s headdress is concerned, there are similarities with the allegorical female figures on tapestries in Florence made after a design by the Florentine artist Francesco Ubertini (1494-1557, called Bachiacca).^[2] The designs for these tapestries, which represent the months of the year, were made between 1549 and 1552. However, the chalk drawings that can be attributed to Bachiacca are less accurate in execution; his painted oeuvre likewise provides too few points of contact to arrive at an acceptable attribution. For the time being the work should be described as anonymous Florentine, second quarter of the sixteenth century.