Head of an Angel, after Leonardo da Vinci

Author: Michael Kwakkelstein

This drawing reproduces the head of the angel in Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin of the Rocks (fig.) in London (begun c.1495-99 and completed between 1506 and 1508).^[1] Leonardo’s painting depicts the Virgin Mary, the blessed Christ Child, the infant Saint John the Baptist and an archangel, possibly Uriel. The painting formed the central panel of an elaborate altarpiece that was installed in the Chapel of the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception in the church of San Francesco Grande, Milan in 1508. It remained in situ until 1781-84 when the altarpiece was dismantled. From the moment of its installation Leonardo’s composition enjoyed great success, as attested by numerous painted copies and adaptations, mostly by Lombard painters.^[2]

The present study is stylistically close to a drawing, executed in black chalk with traces of white heightening, of the bust of a young man at the Louvre that Dominique Cordellier attributed to Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Leonardo’s most gifted Lombard follower.^[3] Boltraffio’s drawings are characterized by a sensitive application of either metalpoint or black or red chalk with sfumato effects, and a full command of the three-dimensionality of form. Interestingly, Boltraffio copied - in reverse - the head of the Virgin in the London version of The Virgin of the Rocks in a metalpoint drawing in Florence.^[4] A further support of an attribution of the Rotterdam drawing to Boltraffio could be the fact that the angel’s hair has not been copied with the same care and degree of finish that is reflected in the figure’s face; most of the spiralling curls have been vigorously sketched with rapid strokes. These contrasting degrees of finish between a figure’s face and hair are typical of Boltraffio’s metalpoint drawings of heads of young men and women.

A later hand has reworked the contours of the angel’s face, the nostril, parts of the mouth and cheek, some of the curls, the left eye, and parts of the right eye with dark ink. Because the rough textured paper (with irregularly spaced chain lines) is particularly thin, the drawing on the recto is clearly visible on the verso of the sheet.