Federico Barocci's importance to the history of art in the sixteenth century is belied by the relatively small number of his drawings in American collections and the complete absence of religious paintings, his most important output. This drawing, one of the first to enter an American public collection, captures well Barocci's renowned facility and expression in black, white and colored chalks. Related to a religious subject, it once belonged to the eminent French collector Dezallier d'Argenville.

Though many of its members were craftsmen, Barocci's family was well-placed. The artist's great-uncle, a sculptor, had come to Urbino from Milan to work for the ducal family, while Barocci's father and uncle were a maker of scientific instruments and a mathematician respectively. Apprenticed to the Venetian artist Battista Franco, the young Federico soon travelled to Pesaro to study perspective under Guidobaldo II della Rovere's architect Bartolomeo Genga, another of his uncles. In Pesaro he came to know the Titians in the ducal collection, while an early trip to Rome took him to stay with yet a third uncle, the head of the della Rovere cardinal's household. Even though he spent the next four years in Urbino, Barocci's reputation in Rome was such that he was called back to the City in 1560 to work on the Casino of Pius IV in the Vatican gardens. Upon completion of the decoration three years later he was struck down by an illness—perhaps poisoned by those jealous of his skill and advantages—which kept him in pain, and in Urbino, for the rest of his life. Nonetheless, he managed to have a fruitful and remunerative career from the provincial city. His best-known works include the Madonna di San Simone for the church of San Francesco in Urbino and the glorious Deposition in Perugia, both of the late 1560s, the Madonna della gatta of 1574 now in London, and the Madonna del Popolo of 1579, while the 1580s and 90s brought a variety of commissions from outside Urbino, including a Circumcision for the confraternity of the Nome di Gesù in Pesaro. Barocci died in 1612.

Barocci's reputation as a draughtsman is enhanced by his sensitive treatment of heads in many shades of chalk and pastel, most often on tinted paper. In this example, the artist first lays in the clothing and outlines of the skull in black chalk, creating the features instead in red while building up the planes of the cheeks and balding forehead through the use of pinkish, ochre and white chalk, well stumped to create smooth volumes. The hair and beard are a fascinating study in textural variety, especially where the smooth darkness of the cheek is blended with wisps of white.

The drawing, which entered the Crocker collection as the work of Federico Barocci, was identified by Vitzthum in 1970 as a preparatory study for the head of Saint Joseph in the Louvre Circumcision of 1590.(2) Joseph's full head of hair in the altarpiece, as well as the presence of a drawing in Vienna showing a version identical to that in the altarpiece,(3) lend some doubt to the relationship. Explained by Pillsbury in 1978 as part of a series of studies documenting the transformation of Joseph's head from round and balding to thinner and hirsute,(4) the head may be related instead to another project, the Madonna di San Simone, for which a chiaroscuro study survives in the Louvre,(5) documenting an unexecuted design with a similar angle for the balding Joseph's head. If the latter is the case, the drawing would date twenty years earlier, to the late 1560s.

However, regarded independently from Barocci's painted work, the Crocker drawing does not seem to be a study at all. A fully-formed head placed before an indeterminate background, the drawing fits well into the category of auxiliary cartoon—a drawing made only after the full cartoon was finished—discussed recently and lucidly by Nicholas Turner.(6) As such it may possibly be independent both of the Louvre Circumcision, for which the Vienna drawing is not a study but rather the relevant auxiliary cartoon, and the Madonna di San Simone, recording a lost composition that used the same distinctive placement of the head.

William Breazeale, in William Breazeale, with Cara Denison, Stacey Sell, and Freyda Spira, A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum, exh. cat. Sacramento and tour, 2010