Head of a Woman

Author: Rosie Razzall

In 1928, Franz Koenigs acquired a group of seven drawings believed to be by Signorelli or his school, followed by a further two drawings in 1929.^[1] Of this total of nine drawings, two are now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, where they are claimed by the State of the Netherlands (I 270 and I 275).^[2]

All nine drawings bear the monogram LS written in pen and ink in one of the lower corners, except for I 287, where the corner has been trimmed diagonally and the letters cut off. In her 1995 PhD thesis and catalogue of Signorelli drawings and copies, Van Cleave listed 21 sheets in an ‘inferior group of copies after Signorelli’, all inscribed in pen and ink with these intertwined initials.^[3] Some of Signorelli’s autograph drawings also bear the initials (for example, in London^[4] and Paris^[5]), but their meaning remains unclear. The letters may have been added by a variety of hands at different dates, or were possibly added to a group of autograph and studio drawings by an early collector.^[6]

Van Cleave inadvertently included only one of the Rotterdam drawings in her cataloguing of this group (I 269), noting the location of others in Berlin^[7] and several private collections.^[8] Clearly all nine Rotterdam drawings belong to the same group, which she describes as after ‘late works by Signorelli and his school… They were obviously familiar with a broad range of Signorelli’s works and may have been resident in Cortona’.^[9] Although she suggests that ‘the copyists may have been working during the mid-sixteenth century, shortly after Signorelli’s death’,^[10] it remains equally possible that they were made by artists in his workshop while he was still alive, and under his direction.

The nine Rotterdam examples are in a range of hands, some juvenile, and are probably all copied after the painted or drawn models circulating in Signorelli’s circle or workshop. Some are drawn in chalks, while others are in pen and ink and wash, a medium that was rarely used by Signorelli himself. Some sheets have been worked on by more than one hand, with chalk drawings reinforced in pen and ink by another artist. Others suggest the presence of two different artists on the recto and verso of the sheet.

The present sheet is a study of the head of a woman looking downwards, with a ribbon wound into her hair. Touches of white chalk have been added to the nose, forehead and chin, but the drawing is simple in its execution, drawn with hesitant black outlines and some areas left blank. The pose of the woman looking downwards bears some relationship to the female saint cradling the head of the Virgin in the Crucifixion with Saints painted for the confraternity of Saint Anthony Abbot in Sansepolcro and completed in 1507, although with some differences to the hair and veil. It may be a copy after that model, though not necessarily taken from the painting. An autograph drawing by Signorelli in Florence,^[11] also depicting a female head in chalk more subtly applied, may have been the kind of example with which this draughtsman was familiar. On the verso is an unidentifiable patterned object, possibly a study of a detail of costume.