Drawing of the month #3

Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-1488)

Head of a woman with elaborate coiffure; looking down slightly to left

Pen and brown ink and wash on paper, 95 x 125 mm, Kunsthalle Bremen – Der Kunstverein in Bremen, Kupferstichkabinett, Inv. 1924/36

Grant Lewis, Milein Cosman Curator at the British Museum, has kindly chosen our third drawing of the month.

1895 was a good year for the British Museum. That September, the Department of Prints and Drawings bagged the astonishing collection of John Malcolm of Poltalloch, which boasted Botticellis, Raphaels and Titians – plus Michelangelo’s only complete surviving cartoon. Any one of these drawings has a claim to being my favourite in Bloomsbury, but for today at least that crown goes to Andrea del Verrocchio’s Head of a Woman.

This delicate study of an ideal woman is probably connected with a banner Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci designed for a joust held in Florence in 1475. Quite how it is related is less clear, but it is unlikely to be directly preparatory. Instead, Verrocchio seems to have used his studies for the banner, especially one on the verso of the sheet, as a springboard to create a new drawing, perhaps made as an end in itself.

The resulting work is one of several highly finished female heads by Verrocchio. The type was very popular: Vasari prized a couple among the contents of his famous ‘book’, and the young Leonardo also imitated his master’s formula. Looking at the British Museum sheet, it is not hard to understand why. With this radiant, gently animated head, Verrocchio conjures an alluring ideal world – a perfect tranquillity spiced with the exotic patterns of plaits and braids in the woman’s impossibly elaborate coiffure. This is a sheet that invites us to admire its maker’s imaginative powers, and yet Verrocchio’s highly tonal, almost painterly treatment of the woman’s face creates a vivid sensation of a real person caught at an introspective moment. Pattern; plasticity; psychology. This drawing’s got it all.