Standing Female Figure in Armor Drawing Her Sword (Minerva or Bellona)

This figure sketch shows the goddess Minerva in plumed helmet and skirted Classical armor standing in three-quarter view facing left about to draw her sword from the scubbard. The drawings is thought to have been preparatory for the statuette of a Classical warrior depicted as a detail at right in Parmigianino’s Portrait of Pier Maria Rossi, Count of San Secondo dated to 1535–38 (Museo del Prado, Madrid), for which another related study is in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples. In comparison to the painted detail, however, the present sketch shows the figure as quite evidently female and with broader bodily proportions. As is typical of Parmigianino's late drawings, the present sketch is executed with bold, curved parallel hatching done with a fine pen. It is exactly comparable in this to the small-scale pen sketches of 1534-40, of which several related to Parmigianino's late masterpieces were shown in the Museum's 2000-2001 exhibition, "Correggio and Parmigianino Master Draughtsmen of the Renaissance." Closely similar examples of this technique of pen drawing are found in the studies for St. Jerome (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), the sketches of a Classical statue on the verso of a sheet with ideas for the Madonna of the Long Neck (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York), and two small sheets in Windsor, one portraying Classical heads and the other a composition of Saturn and Philyra (RL inv. 0526 and 0563).