The Tête d'enfant de trois quarts à droite is a silverpoint drawing on paper by the Florentine painter Leonardo da Vinci.

This is a preparatory study for the head of the infant John the Baptist in the Louvre Museum version of The Virgin of the Rocks, which was commissioned by the Brotherhood of the Immaculate Conception.

[1][2][3] The drawing depicts the head of a very young child, with prick marks around the contours of the eyes, nose, ear, and the top of the skull.

[5] Leonardo da Vinci created the Tête d'enfant de trois quarts à droite when he was thirty years old and had recently moved to Milan from the Florentine workshop of Verrocchio.

[6] Thus, the artist was commissioned to decorate the Immaculate Conception altarpiece, which was the centerpiece of a newly built chapel between 1475 and 1480 in the Church of San Francesco Maggiore in Milan.

[1][6] Art historians have long believed that the drawing originated from the circle of Leonardo da Vinci, including students or workshop members such as Ambrogio de Predis or Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio.

The Tête d'enfant de trois quarts à droite may have served as a pedagogical support, as was common in the master's workshop.

[3][11] The technical mastery displayed, such as the rendering of shadows on the cheek and temple, along with comparisons to other drawings of the painter, such as the Head of a Woman in Profile, a study dating from the early 1490s for the painting of the Madonna Litta, provide strong evidence for this attribution.

[4] It is confirmed that the drawing is a study or even a cartoon for the face of the child John the Baptist[13] in the Louvre's version of The Virgin of the Rocks, to which it almost perfectly superimposes.

[1] The drawing was acquired by the Louvre Museum in 1856 as part of a codex that bears the name of Giuseppe Vallardi (1784–1861), a print and antiquities dealer who had previously owned it.

[1] The Tête d'enfant de trois quarts à droite drawing was likely created as a preparatory cartoon for the Louvre version of The Virgin of the Rocks.

[1] However, this hypothesis remains uncertain as the transfer by pricks may have occurred after the creation of The Virgin of the Rocks, and therefore, it may not have been executed by Leonardo da Vinci himself, but by one of his students on their own production.

[16][17][18][19] Leonardo created the drawing for Tête d'enfant de trois quarts à droite (in Englishː Child's head, three-quarters right) around 1483.

The exhibition catalog 'Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan', edited by Luke Syson and Larry Keith, was published on this occasion.