Head of a Woman In Profile from Left

Author: Rosie Razzall

This drawing was acquired by Franz Koenigs in 1930 as Milanese school, but was exhibited four years later in Amsterdam with an attribution to Michelangelo.^[1] In a review of this exhibition, Lionello Venturi attributed the study to Cesare da Sesto, a Lombard artist who worked in Rome in the first decades of the sixteenth century.^[2] Venturi compared the mark-making in the Rotterdam drawing especially with a red chalk drawing of a child’s head in Vienna.^[3] Although there is some similarity between the two sheets the form of the head in the Vienna drawing is more fully rounded out, and the attribution to Cesare da Sesto has not yet been considered by other scholars.

The draughtsman is evidently familiar with Michelangelo’s style, demonstrating subtlety in the handling of the black chalk in the depiction of an idealized female head. The repetition of the nose and lips below the main profile also suggests a competent artist refining his subject matter rather than making a workshop copy. At the top left corner of the sheet is a round area of damage that has been refilled, possibly from a candle flame.