Recto: a sketch of the head and shoulders of a youth, in profile to the right, with long wavy hair. This is a fine example of Leonardo's standard fine-boned youth before the emergence of his fleshier type later in life. The style of the drawing (and the sketches of machinery on the verso of the sheet, date it to the mid-1480s). The nose is a little more prominent than usual and the hair more luxuriant, but he is a brother of the youths in 912276, a sheet of five or so years earlier.

 

Verso: three sketches of machinery, showing the action of cog-wheels. The paper is lightly coated with a blue-green preparation, akin to a sheet in the Codex Atlanticus (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan; folio 359v-b), which features very similar studies of machinery and may be the original sheet from which the present drawing was cut, probably by Leonardo's heir Francesco Melzi.

The inscription in the recto, A / .i., establishes that this was the first in a sequence of fifty-two consecutively numbered drawings of heads, assembled by Melzi from the drawings of Leonardo that he had inherited.