Estudio para la cabeza de Apolo

Velázquez painted this small head in 1630, during his first journey to Italy, away from his post at the Spanish court and free for once to work as he pleased. It is a study for a larger canvas, the Forge of Vulcan, in which the god Apollo strides into a blacksmith's workshop crowned with laurel to bring bad news, and the labourers freeze mid-hammer to stare. Here Velázquez is just working out the god's head in sharp profile, the laurel leaves, the fall of light along the cheek. X-rays of the finished painting in Madrid show he kept changing his mind, shifting the tilt and the number of leaves as he went. The rest of the figure is barely there, a few loose brown strokes standing in for a body.