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Copy of a Roman Statue of a Seated Woman
circle of Domenico Ghirlandaio (Italian, 1449–1494)
c. 1450–94
- Medium
- pen and brown ink (two different colors) with graphite; framing lines in pen and brown ink
- Classification
- Drawing
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 23 x 12.8 cm (9 1/16 x 5 1/16 in.); Secondary Support: 23 x 12.8 cm (9 1/16 x 5 1/16 in.)
- Culture
- Italy
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Drawings
- Credit line
- Gift of Robert Hays Gries
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
The oddness of a sculptural fragment draped with clothing points to the workshop context of this drawing. When young artists became apprentices to master artists, they sometimes learned to draw by sketching from sculptures, even draping them with fabric in order to practice folds and texture. The technique of this pen-and-ink drawing—with closely spaced, crossed lines within tightly closed outlines—ties it to the circle of Domenico Ghirlandaio, a Florentine painter to which Michelangelo was apprenticed in 1487. Apprentices in Ghirlandaio’s large studio were taught his “system” for creating tone and depth.
