Head of Saint John the Evangelist  1820

This is a study for an altarpiece, Christ Delivering the Keys to Saint Peter, commissioned in 1817 for Santissima Trinità dei Monti, Rome, and completed in 1820 (now Musée Ingres, Montauban). Ingres based the composition on Raphael’s tapestry design of the same theme and developed it in eight oil studies (including this one) and more than seventy drawings. Although the stu...