The Head of the Virgin in Three-Quarter View Facing Right 1510–13 Leonardo da Vinci Italian Fully revealed in 2005, the verso of this sheet is inscribed with a gray-brown ink ".T." that is quite reminiscent of the "Melzi-Leoni" markings on Leonardo’s drawings and manuscripts. The study for the head of the Virgin on the recto has sometimes been doubted by scholars 'ex silentio' as being by Leonardo, possibly because its magical beauty renders it suspicious (Walter Vitzthum in 1966 quoted a recent English critic’s opinion in his support, "the drawing makes one think of Walter Pater’s mind rather

The Head of the Virgin in Three-Quarter View Facing Right 1510–13 Leonardo da Vinci Italian Fully revealed in 2005, the verso of this sheet is inscribed with a gray-brown ink ".T." that is quite reminiscent of the "Melzi-Leoni" markings on Leonardo’s drawings and manuscripts. The study for the head of the Virgin on the recto has sometimes been doubted by scholars 'ex silentio' as being by Leonardo, possibly because its magical beauty renders it suspicious (Walter Vitzthum in 1966 quoted a recent English critic’s opinion in his support, "the drawing makes one think of Walter Pater’s mind rather than of Leonardo’s hand"). However, even in Leonardo’s most densely pictorial drawings, a few traces of his left-handed parallel hatching often remain visible underneath all the layers of the worked up medium. As the detailed scientific analyses of 2002-2003 demonstrated, this drawing is done with a nearly seamless sfumato technique, and is extremely homogeneous in its dense use of red and black chalks, revealing extensive, unified left-handed strokes in the rubbed-in intermediate shadows; these lines are also partly evident with the plain, unassisted eye (laboratory examinations by Marjorie Shelley and Rachel Mustalish, Paper Conservators, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; microphotograph details published and discussed by Carmen C. Bambach in Metropolitan Museum of Art 2003, pp. 41-42, 46-47, figs. 35a-d). The left-handed strokes in the intermediate shadows of modeling had almost gone unnoticed until 2002-2003, as this drawing is much too often discussed by scholars from photographs, rather than from analysis of the original; one early historian who discerned the faint evidence of the "tratto alla mancina" in the drawing was Theodore Rousseau, the curator who acquired the work for the Metropolitan Museum of Art (see press release, dated 8 June 1951, Archive of The Metropolitan Museum of Art). The structural, delicately curving lower right to upper left strokes of t

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