Bust of a Man Wearing a Plumed Helmet

Author: Rosie Razzall

This drawing belongs to a small group of studies in pen and ink of heads in decorative helmets made by Michelangelo in around 1504-06. On this sheet, a male figure in profile wears an elaborate helmet with a scaly beaked visor, beaded netting over the back of the head, and several plumed feathers emerging from the top. The expressive penwork marks the shading across the face and neck as well as the ornamental details of the helmet. The figure’s epaulettes are cursorily drawn with just a few pen strokes. There is a second, smaller head in profile on the right, where a single, rapid line above the head suggests the beginnings of another idea for a dramatic helmet.

The drawing and the other examples with related motifs in Paris,^[1] Hamburg,^[2] Florence,^[3] and in a copy in Dublin^[4] have often been linked to the warriors that appear in The Battle of Cascina, a fresco intended for the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Michelangelo never completed the fresco, but part of the composition is known from a copy of the cartoon in Holkham Hall,^[5] and depicts a group of warriors getting dressed for battle after bathing in the river Arno at Cascina. Only one of the warriors in the cartoon is wearing a decorative helmet, so the studies may be earlier ideas for the composition,^[6] or might belong to another, unrecorded triumphal scene from the same project.^[7] Michelangelo must have been familiar with examples of decorative zoomorphic subjects by Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-1488) and Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519),^[8] whose fresco of The Battle of Anghiari was planned for the opposite wall of the same room. Another more recent theory from Paul Joannides proposes that the figures might relate to the torturers and executioners in another fresco, The Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand, that Michelangelo was designing in around 1506 but never carried out.^[9]

The attribution of the drawing to Michelangelo was slow to take hold among scholars of the mid twentieth century,^[10] but most now accept the drawing as autograph, noting the spontaneity and fluidity of line, and the homogeneity of the subjects in the helmet group.^[11] As a point of comparison, the Paris drawing, in particular, combines finished designs with other much briefer ideas, and the Rotterdam drawing may be a fragment cut from a sheet laid out in a similar manner.^[12] The art historian Charles de Tolnay illustrated the Rotterdam drawing before the removal of a repair in which the missing parts of the drawing – the left hand corners of the sheet and peak of the visor – were made up.^[13] As these additions bore the collector’s stamp of Emile Wauters (L.911), the sheet must have been repaired in or before his ownership in the nineteenth century.

In 1913, Frederic Lees noticed the similarity between the Rotterdam drawing and two faint outline drawings in red chalk of figures in profile wearing helmets or headdresses^[14] on the verso of a drawing by Michelangelo in Oxford, dated to c.1524-25.^[15] One of the heads is partly obscured by the text of a poem, and the one below it is a copy drawn with only a few lines.^[16] The obscured head does bear some similarity to the Rotterdam helmet, especially in the peaked visor, ear flaps, and beaded decoration over the forehead, but the upper part of the helmet differs slightly and there are no plumed feathers. In addition, another study on the Oxford verso might also relate to the pen-and-ink helmet drawings of two decades earlier: the head seen from the front is similar in reverse to one of the heads on the drawing in Paris, but with wings instead of a hooded snake on the headdress. As has already been noted, the sketch of a rider on the Oxford sheet also recalls Michelangelo’s earlier studies for The Battle of Cascina.^[17] Given these three connections to the helmet drawings and Cascina fresco, it seems reasonable to propose that Michelangelo had this subject matter in mind during the teaching exercises carried out on the Oxford sheet, and may even have been referring directly to the Rotterdam and Paris drawings and other sheets for this project still in his workshop. His interest in decorative helmets and hairpieces recurred in this period, as seen in drawings such as the head of a woman, or the Count of Canossa, both in London.^[18]