Head of Christ

Leonardo finished the Last Supper in Milan in 1498, and for a long time this sheet was read as his own study for the head of Christ on that wall. The Brera, which has owned it since 1813, now dates it to about 1500 to 1510 and gives it to a Lombard artist from Leonardo's immediate circle. The argument comes from the strokes themselves. In every layer of the drawing, down to the deepest, the hatching runs from lower left to upper right, the way a right hand runs it, and Leonardo drew left-handed. The Leonardo specialist Pietro Marani has argued that the master had a partial hand in it. The museum, having examined the sheet directly, calls that very hard to accept, and Popham, Berenson and Heydenreich all catalogued it as a follower's work. The head on the paper is drawn at the same size as the head of Christ in the mural.