A drawing of the head of a young man turned in profile to the right. He has heavy classical features, and masses of curly hair. Melzi's number 34.

Early in his career Leonardo fixed on two standard male types, who recur repeatedly in his drawings and paintings: an adolescent with refined features, and an older man with aquiline nose, prominent chin and beetling brow. In the last decade of his life he produced a number of independent drawings of such heads, exercises in form and draughtsmanship simply for his own satisfaction.

This is the most elaborately worked of all Leonardo's drawings of youthful heads, in a highly colouristic technique used by Leonardo for only a few years around 1510. The use of red chalk on red prepared paper limits the tonal contrasts in the face, whereas the black chalk of the hair overlays and mingles with the red in a dense pattern of corkscrews. The long, gently curving horizontal strokes of chalk build up a smoothly rounded surface suggestive of a layer of juvenile fat that has not been shed with the passing of adolescence; the barely defined jaw, merging with the slight pouch of a double chin, the suppressed smile, the straight nose and the untroubled eyes all testify to a life of idle luxury. The profile type is that of the Roman emperor Nero as transmitted to the Renaissance through coins and medals; both sides of a bronze sestertius of Nero, for instance, were copied by Leonardo on a drawing of c.1503-4 (RCIN 912328v), and the head seen there approximates closely to the conception of the present drawing.

Text adapted from M. Clayton, Leonardo da Vinci: the Divine and the Grotesque, London 2002