Study of the Head of Christ

This head corresponds very closely with that of Christ in Muziano’s major altarpiece, The Raising of Lazarus, painted between 1555 and 1558 for the Cathedral at Orvieto and now in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo there. That, and a second large altarpiece for the cathedral, the Way to Calvary, marked a high point in his development as one of the most assured painters of religious pictures in Rome and its dependent territories. This eloquent work, which is evidently an autograph ricordo, was intended for a private, most probably clerical, patron for an intimate setting, possibly a monastic cell.