Federico ZUCCARO

Both sides of this drawing are studies for the heads of onlookers in Federico Zuccaro’s large altarpiece of The Raising of the Son of a Widow of Nain, painted for the cathedral of Orvieto. This was one of two altarpieces commissioned from Zuccaro in November 1568 for the second chapel on the left in the Duomo in Orvieto, the other being The Healing of the Blind Man. Painted on slate, both works were completed in 1570 but were removed from the church in 1880 and are now in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Orvieto. Zuccaro produced a large number of preparatory drawings for each painting, both overall compositional studies and drawings for individual figures. Drawings by Zuccaro for the Raising of the Son of a Widow of Nain are in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the British Museum in London, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Louvre and the Fondation Custodia in Paris, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Albertina in Vienna, and elsewhere.

The head of a young man on the recto of this sheet is found at the left edge of the composition of the Orvieto altarpiece, while the two heads on the verso are in reverse to their counterparts among the spectators in the same painting. As the two studies on the verso of this sheet are offset from another drawing, it would appear that the artist was interested in seeing how these two heads would appear in reverse, although he decided against it in the final painting.

Among stylistically comparable drawings of heads by Federico Zuccaro is a portrait of a young boy, formerly in the collection of Richard and Trude Krautheimer and sold at auction in 1996. Other drawings of the same youth by Zuccaro are in the British Museum, the Louvre and the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.