Face to face with Leonardo returns: sheet with Three views of manly head with beard exhibited in Turin

From March 20 to June 28, 2026, the Spazio Leonardo, on the second floor of the Sabauda Gallery of the Royal Museums of Turin, will host a new edition of A tu tu per tu con Leonardo, the project that offers the public, inside a climate-controlled, armored display case, a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci selected in rotation from those preserved in the Royal Library of Turin.

This year’s edition is dedicated to the autograph sheet Three Views of a Manly Head with Beard (c. 1502, red stone on paper, 110 x 283 mm, Inv. 15573 AD). It is curated by Simone Facchinetti and Arturo Galansino, who also appear in a short video produced by Gallerie d’Italia - Intesa Sanpaolo.

For a long time it was believed that the three male heads drawn in red stone represented Cesare Borgia, known as the Valentino, in whose service Leonardo worked in 1502 as an architect and engineer. However, more recent research, also based on comparisons with known portraits of Borgia, has ruled out this identification. As Giorgio Vasari recounts, Leonardo was in the habit of observing faces that struck him at length, following people even for hours, and then studying and reproducing their features on paper. In this drawing, direct observation results in a careful investigation of the face and its expressions, rendered through a soft, sinuous stroke, particularly evident in the depiction of the beard, which is soft and wavy.

The three depictions of the same head function as a kind of moving portrait, similar to a film sequence: starting from the right, where a more detailed frontal view appears, the gaze moves to the left, with a progressive enlargement of the face and an increasingly essential rendering in the next two studies.

This sheet is part of the extraordinary collection of more than 1,500 drawings acquired in 1839 by Carlo Alberto from Giovanni Volpato, an expert and art dealer active between Turin, London and Paris. Volpato was also the first conservator of the royal graphic collection, personally overseeing its restoration and arrangement for nearly two decades. The Volpato collection represents the main core of the Royal Library’s drawings, which preserves not only Leonardo’s famous thirteen autograph folios but also works by artists such as Michelangelo, Giulio Romano, Guido Reni, Rembrandt, Annibale Carracci, Giambattista Tiepolo, and Antonio Canova, among many other Italian and European masters.

Opened in 2024, the Spazio Leonardo was conceived as a multimedia environment designed to narrate and enhance the Royal Library’s collection of Leonardo’s drawings, which for conservation reasons cannot be permanently displayed. The space includes informational media and interactive tools, including a touch screen that allows the Codex on Flight to be browsed in its entirety. In the center of the stucco-decorated neo-Baroque room is a casket covered in mirror material, on which Leonardo’s writings and drawings are reflected. In the same room there is also a digital screen that projects a short video, in Italian with English subtitles, in which the curators illustrate the characteristics of the drawing on display in the context of Leonardo’s graphic production.

“The corpus of Leonardo’s autograph drawings,” explains Paola D’Agostino, Director General of the Royal Museums of Turin, “is exemplary not only of the richness of the Royal Library’s collections, but also of the refined and far-sighted secular collecting of the Savoy family. The drawing presented this year, with an author’s panel signed by two specialists, is of great fascination to illustrate Leonardo’s assiduous study of the human face, as Simone Facchinetti and Arturo Galansino, whom I thank for their generosity, have well pointed out. The collaboration with Gallerie d’Italia is part of a wider network of institutional relationships that has distinguished the Royal Museums of Turin for several years and that we are expanding both nationally and internationally.”

“We are strengthening our dialogue with the Royal Museums of Turin, bringing together content, expertise and studies dedicated to a great Genius of Italian art. Next fall we will tell the story of Leonardo, his pupils and followers in an important exhibition to be hosted at the Gallerie d’Italia in Milan, together with two exceptional curators, Simone Facchinetti and Arturo Galansino,” said Michele Coppola, Executive Director Arte Cultura e Beni Storici Intesa Sanpaolo and General Director Gallerie d’Italia.

“The collaboration with the Royal Museums of Turin,” say Simone Facchinetti and Arturo Galansino, “is the fruit of their generous support for the upcoming exhibition dedicated to Lombard Lombard painters that will be held from the end of November at the Gallerie d’Italia in Milan and of which we will be the curators, as well as the esteem and friendship that binds us to Paola D’Agostino. These two projects will contribute in different ways to the development of Leonardo studies: the Milan exhibition will shed new light on the master’s pupils and followers, while the Musei Reali will continue to explore the extraordinary corpus of autograph drawings.”

Face to face with Leonardo returns: sheet with Three views of manly head with beard exhibited in Turin

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