Head of a Young Woman (study for the angel)

The drawing is in metalpoint, a stylus of silver drawn over paper coated with a prepared ground, heightened with white. The medium allows no rubbing out. Each line stays.

The head turns three-quarters toward us, the eyes catching ours exactly as the angel's do in the Louvre altarpiece. The hair and shoulder are swift loose strokes; the face is built of fine parallel hatching that runs, as always in his drawings, from upper left to lower right, the natural stroke of a left-handed man.

The art historian Bernard Berenson called it one of the finest drawings in the world. It is kept in the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, with the red chalk head long called his self-portrait.