Profile of an Old Man

This is one of the many old men's heads Leonardo drew in profile, the kind of craggy, deep-lined face he seems to have hunted for in the Florence streets and come back to for years. The features are studied closely: the loose skin under the jaw, the set of the mouth, the thin hair falling behind the ear. There is no saint here and no scene, only a face and what time has done to it, set down by someone who wanted to understand that as precisely as anything else he studied. Heads like this one fed the long line of expressive, half-invented faces he filled his sheets with for the rest of his life.