(Cento 1591–1666 Bologna) Head and Shoulders of a Woman in Profile to the Left, pen and brown ink, over black chalk, on laid paper, 22,2 x 15,2 cm, browned, stained, damaged (tears, losses), mounted, framed, (Sch)

With a certificate by Dr. Nicholas Turner, 10th May 2014, (in copy).

From its style, the present drawing would have been made c. 1640. It was conceived more as a study in costume and hairstyle than as a portrait of an individual. The tradition of making such ideal heads of the kind goes back as least as far as the early 16th century and they are the fore-runners of modern fashion pictures. Jacopo Ligozzi (1547-1627) made a celebrated series of pen-and-ink drawings of women with exotic hair styles, which are among the most lavish in the genre.

Throughout his career, Guercino made drawings of fashionably dressed women, head-and-shoulders and half length. A pen study in the British Museum, London, of a Woman in Profile to the Left, datable c. 1615, is close in costume and hair style to the head in the present drawing (inv. 1952-1-21-43). In the British Museum drawing, most of the woman’s hair is held in place by a band positioned at the back of her head, while some of her locks fall free to the side, covering her ears, in an arrangement not unlike that seen here. In both the drawings, the woman wears a tight-fitting bodice, the billowing sleeves covering the arms and contrasting with her restricted waist-line.

Although no engraving after the present drawing is known, the formality of the subject and the disciplined handling recall those of finished drawings by Guercino, mostly of half-length figures, which were used as prototypes for a set of 11 prints, engraved after the master’s death by the Bolognese printmaker Domenico Maria Bonaveri (1653-after 1719).

One of the prints by Bonaveri, Half-length woman, half turned to the Right, for which there is a finished drawing, in reverse, in the Art Museum, Princeton University, belongs to the same category of costume study as the drawing here under discussion, except the woman has tightly curled hair and no head-dress (inv. 49-68; Gibbons 390). The plainness of her hair style is compensated for by a richly decorated dress, with a fine, semi-transparent material covering her bosom, between her décolleté and her neck, and is finished by a frilly collar, with even tighter undulations than those at the top of the blouse of the woman in this drawing.

We are grateful to Dr. Nicholas Turner for the scientific support.