Study for Female Head (verso); Head of Christ (recto)

Carlo Francesco Nuvolone · 1635/40

Medium

Black, red, brown, and ochre chalks, with stumping and touches of graphite, heightened with white chalk (recto), and black, red, yellow, and brown chalks, heightened with white chalk (verso), on blue laid paper (faded to tan on recto)

Original size

35.8 × 27.2 cm (14 1/8 × 10 3/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

This double-sided chalk study — a female head on one side, a Head of Christ on the other — offers a rare, unguarded look into a seventeenth-century Milanese master's preparatory process. Carlo Francesco Nuvolone worked in the shadow of his father Panfilo and alongside his brother Giuseppe, yet carved out a distinctive voice within the Lombard tradition — one shaped by Venetian colorism and a deeply felt religious sensibility. This drawing, executed in black, red, brown, and ochre chalks with stumping and white heightening on blue laid paper, demonstrates his exceptional facility with natural media: the subtle blending through stumping achieves the soft, sculptural transitions typically associated with his finished canvases. The recto's paper has faded from blue to tan over nearly four centuries, lending the Head of Christ a worn, almost relic-like quality. The work is held in the Art Institute of Chicago, which attributes it firmly to Nuvolone on the basis of stylistic comparison with his documented religious commissions from the 1630s. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the intimacy and tonal delicacy of this chalk study into the permanence of oil on canvas, preserving the warm palette and quiet devotional intensity that Nuvolone brought to even his most private working drawings.