Female Head

Most of what a Florentine painter leaves behind is on panel, finished and varnished. This is the quieter stage before that. It is a drawing of a woman's head, made around 1475, and it lives not on the Uffizi's walls but in its cabinet of drawings and prints, the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe. Sheets like this were working documents, a way of fixing a face or the fall of hair before it went into a painting. It is small, a little over 20 centimeters each way, and it still carries the old inventory mark that has followed it for generations, 1254 E.