Head of a Girl in Profile

Thought to be a sketch by Raphael in the late nineteenth century, the drawing was only recently attributed to Parmigianino.

The girl’s head drawn on paper does not correspond with certainty to any pictorial project and rather appears to be an interpretation of an ideal image inspired by Raphael’s female models and, in particular, the canons of beauty expressed in their faces. The soft blurred lines of red chalk are inspired by Correggio: in around 1520, Parmigianino worked alongside his older colleague on the fresco for the church of San Giovanni Evangelista in Parma, where he would have studied his drawings mainly executed by using this technique.