Head of Saint Jerome

Andrea del Verrocchio ran one of the busiest workshops in Florence in the 1470s, a place that turned out bronze, marble and paint, and where a teenaged Leonardo da Vinci was learning the trade. This small head of Saint Jerome is a rare survival from that world: a study made in tempera on paper, later mounted on wood so it could be kept and collected. It was almost certainly working material, not a finished picture, a worked-out head for an altarpiece, the gaunt face and thin hair set down to be reused in a larger Crucifixion. Studies like this were the ordinary machinery of a Florentine shop, drawn and painted so a composition could be built up piece by piece before anyone touched the final panel.