Tuscan Wooden Head - C. 1560-1580

This imposing head embodies, at the heart of the sculpted production of the Cinquecento, the new look brought by Mannerist artists to classical ideal beauty, which they reinterpreted in the light of new aesthetic canons. Our oval face with smooth planes thus presents a strong character marked by large almond-shaped eyes with thick eyelids, housed in two very hollow eye sockets whose depth is accentuated by brow ridges with drooping flesh. Her strong, straight nose, as well as her mouth with sensual, half-open lips, echo the virile feminine type of Michelangelo (1475-1564) from which our artist seems to draw inspiration here. The hair of our subject is elegantly distributed on either side of her face, falling above her ears in large wavy locks that disappear into her neck. Structured by a carefully drawn parting, this sophisticated hairstyle is enhanced by a ribbon tied on the young woman's forehead, and by a braided chignon on the back of her head. The physiognomy of this face and its elaborate hairstyle place this sculpture in the wake of Florentine creations of the High Renaissance. The decorative and artificial aspect of the arrangement of our subject's hair indeed presents close affinities with that of a corpus of works produced by Vincenzo Danti (1530-1576)1, Bartolomeo Ammanati (1511-1592) or Giambologna (1529-1608)2, in the heart of the city of the Medici, in the years 1550-1580, all promoters of a more elegant translation of Mannerism in its forms. Our head then expresses the original personality of an artist who, in the true Florentine tradition of the Cinquecento, gives life to an exuberant and precious sculpture, which has nothing to envy to the marble statuary of the time. The technical prowess which transpires from this wood, its face both pleasant and disturbing, and the deliberately ornate character which it conveys through certain motifs, make this work a brilliant manifestation of the "grande maniera" which was then spreading throughout Europe.