Head of the Adoring Virgin

Giovanni Battista Piazzetta’s drawings far outnumber his paintings. He was chiefly known for book illustrations and head drawings—the so-called “character heads”—but this drawing may be one of just about twenty preparatory sheets by him to survive. Although it does not match any surviving painting by the artist, it bears close similarities with the head of the Virgin Mary in Piazzetta’s altarpiece in Santa Maria della Fava in Venice, painted in 1725–27. It is also possible, however, that Piazzetta made the sheet after the fact, recording his own painting in a drawing that, after adding the Virgin’s hands joined in prayer, he would later sell as an independent work or use as preparatory for a small devotional painting.