Head of a Woman

This head is unfinished, and that is much of its strange power. Leonardo drew and painted the face in soft detail, the lowered eyes, the tilt of the head, then left the tousled hair and the shoulders as little more than rough sketch on the poplar panel. It is usually placed around the years he was working on Leda and the swan, and some scholars think it a study connected to that lost picture. The attribution has never fully settled. In 1896 the director of the Parma gallery even accused a former owner of forging it, and though most experts now read it as Leonardo's own hand, a few still argue for a pupil. Whoever held the brush left the hair as a storm of loose lines around a face finished to stillness.