Copy of a Roman Statue of a Seated Woman

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.