Studies of a Head and Other Figures

Author: Giada Damen

Both sides of this sheet are filled with studies drawn at two very different scales. Interspersed in the spaces between the larger and more finished drawings in wash are smaller, quickly-drawn figure studies in pen and ink. A large and striking grotesque head of a partially toothless man occupies a large portion of the recto. The figure bears a strong resemblance to one of the onlookers in Andrea Mantegna’s painting Ecce Homo in Paris.^[1] The two men are not identical, but the strong connection between the two figures is clear, especially in the puffy, veined eyelids and the vertical headpiece. This had already been noted by Emile Bertaux in 1913.^[2] The head of an old man is surrounded by more than a dozen small sketches, rapidly drawn in pen and ink and evidently added to the sheet at a later moment. Among these can be recognized the figure of a standing man in Renaissance clothing, at centre left, and a haloed nude male figure with his hands tied behind his back, presumably for a Saint Sebastian, near the top margin of the paper. The verso of the sheet bears instead three finished studies: one is the head of the Virgin Mary, another the head of a child wrapped in a blanket, and the third the study of a baby’s foot. These drawings are all related to the painting The Virgin and Child with Four Saints in London attributed to the Veronese painter Francesco Bonsignori (c.1455/1460-1519).^[3]

The present sheet of studies can be compared in style and size to another double-sided drawing now at Windsor, which was executed by the same hand and probably in the same context of the present one; it is possible that both sheets came from an artist’s sketchbook.^[4] The year 1479 is inscribed on the recto of the present drawing together with a fragmentary inscription, which has been interpreted by several scholars as reading ‘donum domini ac magistri mei’ (the gift of my Lord and Master).^[5]

In the nineteenth century the sheet was considered a work by the early Netherlandish painter Quentin Matsys (1466-1530),^[6] but in 1911 Schmidt-Degener first published it as a work by Mantegna.^[7] The attribution was later revised, and several alternatives have been suggested for the sheet’s authorship. In 1963, Eberard Ruhmer, for example, believed the drawing to be by the Ferrarese Ercole de Roberti (1451-1496).^[8] However, a consensus around Mantegna has emerged in more recent scholarship, though the drawing has been described as ‘one of the most problematic and mysterious of the drawings produced in Mantegna’s circle’.^[9]

The iconographic connections between the studies on the sheet with paintings by Mantegna and his contemporary Bonsignori seem to suggest that the drawing was made by an artist in the circle of Mantegna who probably had access to paintings by the master himself, or to drawings used in the workshop. The inscription on this sheet seems to corroborate the idea that drawings were circulating as models and gifts among artists in the same circle.