Studies of the Head of an Infant (after a three-dimensional model)

Poppi (Francesco Morandini)

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

During the Italian Renaissance, drawing sculptures was a fundamental step in the training of a young draftsman. On this sheet, the artist known as Poppi (from his birthplace in Tuscany) drew a group of six studies of heads after a three-dimensional model, a sculpture or marble relief of a putto or a cherub. The artist changed his position point of view for each study, filling the page with the same motif from various angles in order to achieve a full understanding of its form and volume. The present sheet is directly comparable to a large series of drawings in the Uffizi, Florence done similarly from cast copies and sculptures. This type of smiling, or laughing, infant heads surprisingly resembles examples by Jacopo Sansovino (1486-1570). The sheet may date between Poppi’s 1572 trip to Rome - where he was greatly exposed to sculpture, both antique and contemporary - and 1574, the year of his admission to the Accademia del Disegno in Florence.

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.

Metropolitan Museum of Art