This is a study for the head of Saint Francis in Il Perdono di San Francesco in the church of Saint Francis in Urbino (Fig. 1), A. Emiliani, Federico Barocci, Bologna, 1985, I, p. 104, illustrated. The altarpiece was one of the most important in Barocci's oeuvre, as is apparent from the large number of related drawings still extant and the print that Barocci himself engraved after the picture in 1581, Emiliani, op. cit., I, p. 116. The picture was commissioned by Nicolò Ventura just before his death on 5 September 1574, for the price of one hundred scudi. The composition must have been well under way when, on 17 May 1575, the Franciscan brothers rented a room over the Church of San Antonio for Barocci for a year while the artist completed the picture. On 2 June of the following year, the artist wrote to a friend in Arezzo that the altarpiece was finished.
The head of Saint Francis in the Urbino picture had been painted on paper and then laid down on canvas; this, according to Andrea Emiliani, was done in order to obtain a more subtle effect. Andrea Lazzari argued, in his Memorie di alcuni celebri pittori d'Urbino in 1800 (in H. Olsen, Federico Barocci, Copenhagen, 1962, p. 159), that the head of Saint Francis was stuck onto canvas because the artist had experienced difficulties with the head and had to change it several times. This statement is contradicted by the number of studies for the head and composition that are all close to the final picture: the present drawing, a more finished one for the head in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, the study for Saint Francis in the Uffizi, the cartoon in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg and the bozzetto in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche at Urbino, Emiliani, op. cit., nos. 191, 193, 182, 181, illustrated.
The head of Saint Francis was later re-used in The Stigmatization of Saint Francis painted for a small provincial church in Fossombrone after 1576, Emiliani, op. cit., p. 120, illustrated.