A drawing of the head and shoulders of an elderly man, his head turned in profile to the right, and his body three quarters to the right. He has thick curly hair, and a heavy neck and jaw.

Early in his career Leonardo fixed on two standard male types, who thereafter recur repeatedly in his drawings and paintings: an adolescent with refined features, and an older man with aquiline nose, prominent chin and beetling brow, based to a large degree on ancient Roman models – marble busts, coins and medals, through which the likenesses of the Roman emperors were known to the Renaissance. Though Leonardo had relatively little interest in ancient prototypes, this facial type clearly fascinated him.

In the last decade of his life Leonardo produced a number of independent drawings of such heads, exercises in form and draughtsmanship simply for his own satisfaction. This is the finest example of the middle-aged ‘warrior’ type, a counterpart of RCIN 912557 in its combination of chalks, but with the smoothness of that drawing replaced by wide variations of surface texture that convey a sense of slack skin over firm muscle – areas of chalk rubbed into the surface, stumping, wetting the tip of the chalk, and accents in black chalk around the facial features as well as the hair.

Text adapted from Leonardo da Vinci: A life in drawing, London, 2018