The tablet, inserted in a precious late fifteenth-century frame, represents the head of a young woman with a sweet downward gaze and a slight absorbed smile; it is a female typology that recalls other Leonardo figures, such as the Virgin of the Rocks, Leda, or Sant'Anna. It was therefore assumed that it could be a preparatory drawing for a larger work, as the "unfinished" aspect of the painting would also indicate, which highlights a sharp contrast between the barely sketched hatching of the hair, which seems to swell like moved by the wind and then fall on the shoulders in small serpentine waves, and the accurate definition of the features of the face, which a skilful and calibrated light effect highlights, emphasizing the broad forehead, the straight nose and the small and round chin of the young woman. Made towards the end of the fifteenth century, the Scapiliata represents at the same time a symbol and an enigma, a unique work of its kind, the result of the most modern experimentalism of Leonardo da Vinci, aimed at the search for new expressive means capable of summarizing in two-dimensional space all the complexity of the real universe: movement, life, affects, that is the feelings proper to the emotional and psychological sphere of the subject. Its collecting history is also enigmatic. First belonging to Beatrice d'Este, then to her son Federico II Gonzaga, its traces were lost for over a century, it reappeared in Milan where one of the greatest painters of the Parma Academy, Gaetano Callani, bought it for his collection. which in 1839 his son sold to the Gallery.