The Head of a Woman Looking Up (Judith)

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).