The Head of a Woman Looking Up (Judith)
Guido Reni
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
Striking for its coloristic richness-a pictorial quality imparted by the combination of red and black chalk-this head of a young woman is a preparatory study for Reni's painting Judith and Holofernes, a celebrated and much replicated composition. The present study was most probably derived from life, to judge from the bold immediacy of the contours and the quick zig-zagging of the parallel hatching of the shading. The elegiac beauty of the young female model that is seen here would be idealized by the artist into a more athletic, heroic type in the painted composition. In the drawing, which exhibits theexquisite "two-chalk" technique is typical of Guido's work of the mid 1620s, the upturned head of the figure exhibits gentler facial features and a softer modeling of the flesh in the area of the neck. The Museum owns a further preparatory drawing for the same painting (62.123.1), a study formerly collected by the Italian connoisseur Sebastiano Resta.The painted canvas that is favored as Guido Reni's autograph original is that in the Sedlmayer Collection, Geneva, but a further monumental variant on the same subject is in the Galleria Spada in Rome (234 x 150 cm; See Federico Zeri, La Galleria Spada in Roma, 1953, p. 110). The Museum also owns three reproductive engravings after this celebrated composition by Reni (nos. 51.501.4564; 51.501.4574; 51.501.5060).
Drawings and Prints
An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.