Caricature of an Old Man's Head

Author: Michael Kwakkelstein

This drawing is a copy after a red chalk drawing by Leonardo da Vinci now in Rome.^[1] The scale of the figure corresponds exactly with that of the figure depicted in the original, except that the Rotterdam sheet is of reduced dimensions (the sheet in Rome measures 182 x 105 mm). The copyist omitted Leonardo’s left-handed shading of the figure, focusing his attention instead on copying the figure’s outlines. As well as choosing not to employ red chalk, the artist reinforced his black chalk drawing with pen and ink.

The early provenance of Leonardo’s drawing in Rome is unknown, making it difficult to establish where and when the copyist could have had access to it. According to the Milanese painter and author of writings on art, Giovan Paolo Lomazzo (1538-1592), the Milanese painter Aurelio Luini (c.1530-1593) owned a libricciuolo (little book) of over fifty drawings in red chalk by Leonardo depicting ‘dissimilar old men and laughing rude men and women’.^[2] The modest dimensions of the sheet in Rome and the fact that it has a drawing in red chalk on the verso, depicting the bust of a bald man with a monstrous face in profile to the left, suggest that it might have belonged to Luini’s libricciuolo. Another copy of the drawing in Rome belongs to a group of 104 sheets with faithful copies, executed in black chalk, after Leonardo’s drawings of the busts of old men and women with grotesque heads.^[3] That the artist of these copies had access to the sheet now in Rome is shown by the fact that he also copied the drawing on its verso.^[4] Following Luini’s death in 1593, the libbriciuolo was dismantled and the drawings were dispersed. The sheer quantity of extant copies after Leonardo’s celebrated drawings of ‘teste bizarre’ (bizarre heads, as they were described by Vasari) supports the assumption that they originated as a pupil’s drawing exercise, which seems to have also been the purpose of the Rotterdam drawing.^[5]