Copy of a Roman Statue of a Seated Woman (c. 1450–94): Art, History and Details

Copy of a Roman Statue of a Seated Woman (c. 1450–94) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Domenico Ghirlandaio (Italian, 1449–1494).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The oddness of a sculptural fragment draped with clothing points to the workshop context of this drawing. When young artists became apprentices to master artists, they sometimes learned to draw by sketching from sculptures, even draping them with fabric in order to practice folds and texture. The technique of this pen-and-ink drawing—with closely spaced, crossed lines within tightly closed outlines—ties it to the circle of Domenico Ghirlandaio, a Florentine painter to which Michelangelo was apprenticed in 1487. Apprentices in Ghirlandaio’s large studio were taught his “system” for creating tone and depth.

Object facts

• Title: Copy of a Roman Statue of a Seated Woman
• Date: c. 1450–94
• Creator attribution: Domenico Ghirlandaio (Italian, 1449–1494)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pen and brown ink (two different colors) with graphite; framing lines in pen and brown ink
• Dimensions: Sheet: 23 x 12.8 cm (9 1/16 x 5 1/16 in.); Secondary Support: 23 x 12.8 cm (9 1/16 x 5 1/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - Italian
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1939.653

Collection credit

Gift of Robert Hays Gries

Further reading listed by the museum

• Miller, Michael. "A Michelangelo Drawing." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 77, no. 5 (1990): 146-74.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.