The Head of a young Woman in Profile

This refined study belongs to the celebrated series of highly finished ‘head studies’ produced by Gandolfi in late eighteenth-century Bologna. Admired for their expressive immediacy and virtuoso handling, such works were collected as autonomous artworks as well as used as the basis for prints. The methodical use of tight hatching in the present drawing is reminiscent of the technique of engraving, and indeed, it is a preparatory study, in reverse and of identical dimensions, for Gandolfi’s etching The Head of a Woman in Profile to the Right, datable to the late 1770s or 1780s, an example of which is in the Pinacoteca nazionale di Bologna (inv. PN21918, fig. 1).

Of the present sheet, art historian Donatella Biagi Maino notes ‘This drawing, both for its preparatory character but especially for the superb quality of draughtsmanship and invention…should be considered an important addition to the catalogue of drawings by Gandolfi.’ (D. B. Maino et al., op. cit., p. 112.).

Fig. 1: Gaetano Gandolfi (1734-1802), The Head of a Woman in Profile to the Right, etching, Pinacoteca nazionale di Bologna, inv. PN21918