Auction introduction: This second iteration of the new-format Master Works on Paper from Five Centuries sale – first held, with great success, in London last July – again presents a selection of exceptional drawings, watercolours and gouaches that together chart in fascinating ways the development of the art of drawing in Europe over the centuries, and the great variety of functions that this many-faceted art form served. A key highlight is also one of the earliest drawings in the sale: the immensely refined and moving, rediscovered Head of a Young Woman Looking Down, drawn by the young Fra Bartolommeo in the late 1490s. Though clearly an image of the face of a real person, posed in the studio, this transcendent work was surely intended to serve as the model for a painted figure of the Madonna, highlighting the ambiguity of function to be found in many images of the human face (discussed in more detail in the small feature below).