Leonardo da Vinci - Head of a Man in Profile Facing to the Left 1490-1494
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Head of a Man in Profile Facing to the Left 1490-1494
11x5cm pen and brown ink, over soft black chalk
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
The image is only being used for informational and educational purposes
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From The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York:
In his studies from the late 1480s onward, Leonardo would increasingly link his exploration of human physiognomy to that of the "ages of man." While he often portrayed youth as possessing perfectly proportioned features, he would depict old age as marred by caricaturesque deformity. In this fragmentary study from about 1490-94, Leonardo began to draw the grotesque aquiline profile of an old man in charcoal or soft black chalk, as is seen in the underdrawing, but then transformed it by carefully reworking the drawing in pen and ink to portray a younger man. The most dramatic change occurs in the nose, which in the pen-and-ink drawing appears shorter and straighter. The noble mature profile in the finished form evokes the portraits of Roman emperors seen in antique medals, cameos, and coins, but it bears an uncanny resemblance to the profile of Bartolommeo Colleoni (which may not be an actual portrait of the condottiere) in Andrea del Verrocchio's monumental bronze equestrian monument (Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice). Leonardo's master had secured the commission in 1481-83 from the Venetian Republic but had finished only the models at his death in June 1488. The casting of the Colleoni monument in bronze was entrusted to Alessandro Leopardi in 1490 and was finished in the spring of 1496 (all of which falls more or less within the dates of Leonardo's Metropolitan Museum drawing).