Unknown Maker, French

Chiaroscuro prints were initially developed to evoke tonal drawings, but such drawings were made in very different styles across the period. Parmigianino’s Antique Head reveals subtle tonal washes and his characteristic cross-hatching. The 16th-century image of St. Michael is typical of a drawing worked with red chalk wash as the middle ground and defined with lighter and darker washes of brown ink and additional white highlights. The highlights are translated in the chiaroscuro prints into the negative space of the white paper. The later drawing, attributed to Benedetto Luti, allows the white of the paper to represent the highlights while middle tones are created by clearly worked layers of gray ink, comparable to the chiaroscuro prints in gray tones by Hendrik Goltzius.

The Study of an Antique Head of Julius Caesar is one of a group of drawings by Parmigianino from the same sculpture bust, an earlier collector in the 17th or 18th century mistakenly attributed the drawing as being by Leonardo da Vinci.