I love your blog, and I’m always looking forward to new posts! Thanks so much for all that you’re sharing here…

B

http://members.home.nl/robtenberge/schema/animatie.html

Perhaps you’re still too rational to believe in reincarnation ( the other inconvenient truth).

Thanks for the comments. You may well be right (though I have heard Vasari’s accuracy called into question as well, dispite his first-hand reports).

Not having done any scholarly research on this myself, I’ll leave the topic open in terms of the attribution of the sculpture, but I note with interest that the profile by Melzi fits nicely with the red chalk drawing.

Thanks!

Here is another image of Melzi’s drawing: http://z.about.com/d/arthistory/1/0/X/B/Melzi_Leonardo.jpg

Thanks, as always, for your comments.

I know what you mean about artists having a particular type of face they like to portray, Da Vinci seems to do that with women’s faces, but I don’t see it as much with his portrayal of men, who are often grotesque and distinctly individual.

The thing that convinced me of the relationship of the three images wasn’t so much the comparison of the faces to each other, but the comparison with the image above, which I still accept as a self-portrait, mainly because it strongly “feels” like one to me, and always has.

Thanks. Glad to hear it.

I agree, That’s one thing I wouldn’t have done, is thrown out the possibility of Leonardo drawing his own profile using multiple mirrors.

If anyone at the time might have been playing with multiple reflective surfaces, in addition to any other optical effects, it would have been him.