Head of a woman

Sensibly drawn with Procaccini’s distinctive technique in black and red chalk, this head study was published by Nancy Ward Neilson (op. cit.) and dated to the second decade of the 17th Century, when the artist was largely influenced by Genoese art and the local work of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). The figure’s delicate yet pointy facial features appear, in fact, as a clear homage to the great Flemish painter. The sheet relates closely to the Head of an Angel in the Albertina, Vienna (inv. 24985), also drawn on blue paper, and might be a preparatory study for the angel’s face seen at right in Procaccini’s Holy Family in the Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan (inv. 218).