Getty Museum
Head of a Boy (recto); Figure Studies (verso)
Creator
Federico BarocciItalian Artist · 1535–1612
All works by this person →As one of Italy's leading altarpiece painter in the late 1500s, Federico Barocci exerted a profound influence on his contemporaries. He moved beyond the linear style of his teacher Battista Franco around 1563, when he discovered Correggio's *sfumato* effects, which made the defining lines of forms appear to dissolve into delicately colored, smoky mists. Barocci's decorations for the Casino of Pope
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- about 1586–1589
- Medium
- Black chalk, red chalk, and pink fabricated chalk (recto); black chalk (verso), on blue paper
- Culture
- Italian
- Department
- Drawings
- Institution
- Getty Museum
Federico Barocci used different colored chalks against colored paper to create a dynamic composition of a single head. He placed the boy's head diagonally on the page, and gave it a sense of forward motion by heavily applying light-colored chalks on the face. These light tones appear to advance to the front, and that movement is heightened by the recession into space created by the blue paper. Throughout his career, Barocci made many such studies of heads drawn from life in colored chalks. Barocci made this tender drawing as a study for the head of the infant Ascanius, son of Aeneas, in his only secular narrative painting, *Aeneas's Flight from Troy* . Lightly drawn studies for the figure of Ascanius cover the verso.
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