Head of a Man in Profile 1490s

Curator: Signorelli's "Head of a Man in Profile," a drawing from the 1490s currently residing here at the Met, offers such a tender, almost melancholic air, doesn’t it? Editor: Absolutely. There's an immediate impression of downward cast thoughts and the palpable weight of charcoal on paper. Curator: You zeroed right in on what gets me—the medium! That delicate interplay of charcoal and perhaps some pencil too... it really lays bare the artistic process, doesn't it? I sense this study, this moment of Signorelli truly wrestling with form. Editor: It's tempting to speculate whether the subject might have been part of his workshop. One of many helping with the day-to-day of frescoing those huge villa commissions he was pulling in! His intense stare is almost forensic in its construction, focusing on proportion and tone. The very act of making these portraits reveals so much about the economic infrastructure of artistic production at the time, labor made visible. Curator: Yes! Exactly! You’re right; there’s a frankness here, isn’t there? Beyond mere skill, it's about probing the sitter’s essence, capturing the inward space. He's lost in thought, it seems to me...maybe grappling with those same artistic choices? A meditation in parallel. Editor: Right, and not in a romanticised or aggrandizing way, as so many grandees had it at that point. But almost brutally functional. To echo your idea of a meditation though...perhaps the very slowness involved in charcoal portraiture encouraged such reflection? Curator: I imagine so. The slow burn of charcoal across paper… almost meditative! Well, whatever his intentions, or indeed the sitter's disposition that day, the piece truly speaks, and it offers endless food for thought! Editor: It’s certainly rewarding to unpack this from both conceptual angles: not only do we engage in thinking of what drove Signorelli’s technical focus, we learn that even during The Renaissance, there are elements that make this both ancient *and* remarkably new.