Study of the Virgin, looking down to the left (recto); An ear and the back of a man's head (verso)

This small and refined depiction of a veiled woman, undoubtedly intended as the Virgin, is executed in a technique mastered at the end of the fifteenth century by artists such as Giovanni Bellini and other painters in his circle. Vittore Carpaccio, however, brought the technique to a new level of refinement by using blue paper as support (C. Whistler, Venice and Drawing, New Haven, 2016, pp. 107-110). The drawing can be compared with works by the artist such as two studies of heads on a double-sided sheet at the Morgan Library and Museum (inv. I, 54; see R. Eitel-Porter in Italian Renaissance Drawings at the Morgan Library and Museum, exhib. cat., New York, Morgan Library and Museum, 2019, no. 56, ill.).