Head of a Woman

Leonardo's Head of a Woman, known as La Scapigliata (the disheveled one), is one of his most intimate surviving works — an unfinished sketch-like painting that captures a female head in the sfumato manner that was his greatest technical innovation. The work was likely a preparatory study or an independent meditation on the female face rather than a finished commission, its deliberately incomplete state revealing Leonardo's working method — the face brought to a high finish in the sfumato manner while the hair and background remain in a preliminary state. La Scapigliata's combination of extreme finish in some areas with conspicuous incompleteness in others has fascinated viewers and scholars for centuries as a window onto Leonardo's creative process.

The extraordinary sfumato of the finished face contrasts with the freely sketched hair, creating a fascinating document of Leonardo's technique where the luminous modeling emerges from raw underdrawing.